Periphery

Chapters

Guard Duty
Oil on Canvas
The Running of the Sharps
Gallows Humour

Guard Duty

Two nearly comatose security ponies stood, slump-shouldered and dull-eyed, at one of Stable Two's busiest hallway intersections. It was 3 A.M., and the Stable was asleep. Only the quiet rattle of air through loose pipes and the whir of distant machines disturbed the silence. That, and the soft whistling of Lemonwood's breathing.

“Don't fall asleep,” Evening Breeze said. He prodded his companion.

Lemonwood snorted and shook her head. “I'm not.”

“We've got three hours left.”

“I know.”

“You were snoring.”

“Nuh uh. I was just breathing loud.”

Breeze sighed and turned his gaze back down the corridor. It was long enough, and dim enough, that it stretched off into darkness. It was like looking into a horizontal abyss. Some younger security officers couldn't handle night shifts in the main thoroughfare, but Evening Breeze and Lemonwood were seasoned. Half of their postings were after hours, when there was nothing to do but gaze off into nothing.

Lemonwood started snoring again.

He nudged her again. “I can't keep covering for you. If Valour catches you napping on the cam footage one more time—”

“I'm just breathing loud!” she blurted, blinking hard. Her front legs wobbled.

Evening Breeze glared up at the ceiling. “Put on some music or something,” he said.

“That's not allowed.”

“Neither is falling asleep. One of those will get you a reprimand, the other might get you demoted.”

“I'm not even sleepy.”

“Put on some music.”

“Fine.” Lemonwood fiddled with the device on her foreleg, passed through a few menus, and finally spun a dial.

A mare's voice, Velvet Remedy's, underscored by prerecorded music and a hint of static, blasted out of Lemonwood's PipBuck. Every syllable crashed and bounced off the metal walls, floor and ceiling.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Evening hissed, and swatted his partner's shoulder. “Put an earpiece in before you wake everypony in the Stable!”

As Lemonwood rolled her eyes and fiddled with her PipBuck, and as Evening Breeze looked around fervently at every closed door, praying that none of them would open, the quiet clatter of hoofsteps rose beside them.

Slow, careful, and dainty, Velvet Remedy crossed behind the two security officers, walked across the hallway, and disappeared around the corner. The sound of Velvet's hoofsteps faded just as the recording of her voice finally fell silent.

“Luna help us,” Evening moaned into his hoof. “I can't believe I'm still working this post.”

Lemonwood hummed. “Yeah, me neither.”

“I hate you.”

“Mmhmm.” She nodded her head to the music. “Ahhh. Gotta love Velvet Remedy.”

Evening Breeze ground his teeth and turned resolutely back to the endless hallway, ears pricked and eyes wide.

A minute passed. Lemonwood let out a whistling snore.

Breeze had a feeling the next three hours would be long ones.

The room containing Stable Two's massive, cog-shaped door wasn't really used for anything. The door never opened, after all, and the awkward arrangement of dusty terminals, inscrutable mechanisms, and haphazard metal catwalks made the room impractical for most other uses. Evening Breeze had only been there once before, when the engineers were conducting their decennial systems check—which didn't include testing the actual door, of course.

That night, however, they were stationed directly in front of the massive steel slab. Just the two of them, alone in a weird room at the ass end of the Stable.

“This is dumb,” Evening Breeze said.

“You're dumb,” Lemonwood snapped back. When news about Velvet Remedy's escape to the surface reached the department heads, Security Chief Valour hadn't been thrilled. For Evening Breeze, that meant a somber meeting and a strike against his good record. Given Lemon's already spotty record, she'd probably gotten much worse.

Her favourite performer abandoning the Stable probably wasn't easing her nerves either.

“I can't believe nopony else was available,” he muttered.

“Everypony hates this shift. Even I hate this shift.” Lemonwood scowled. “Fuck, that's probably why Valour wanted me here. This is my punishment. Two graveyard shifts in a row.”

Evening Breeze kicked idly at a metal cylinder built into the wall that was presumably a very important piece of the machinery around them. “Stable Two's first major breach ever happened yesterday, under our watch, and they put us back on the same shift the next day?”

“You're dumb,” Lemonwood repeated. “I told you, they're just fucking with us. Nopony can figure out how she opened the door in the first place. Even if somepony else wanted to leave, they wouldn't be able to.”

“We don't know that. Maybe she told somepony.”

Lemonwood rolled her eyes and said, “Not everypony's as terrible at their jobs as we are, and—”

Evening Breeze raised an indignant hoof. “Hey! I'm not—”

“Yes, you are,” she said. “And since we're here, that means that either Valour and the Overmare know exactly how Velvet opened the door and who she talked to before she left, or they've changed the password or something. Nothing else makes sense.”

Evening Breeze was quiet for a moment. “Maybe… maybe they are also terrible at their jobs?”

The sound of faint hoofsteps came from beyond the room's entrance. Lemonwood stood at attention.

“Think about it,” Evening continued. “The Overmare's supposed to be the only one who can open the door, right? If a random singer found out, she must have gotten it from the Overmare.”

Lemonwood ignored him. She took a step forward. “Hey! Who's there? Don't you know what time it is?”

Evening paused. “Is somepony there?”

“Yeah. Hoofsteps.”

After a long moment of silence, a small, unremarkable unicorn filly stepped into the doorway. Heavy saddlebags hung from her sides, her eyes were wide, and her mouth turned in an awkward grin. She opened her mouth.

Evening Breeze cleared his throat, interrupting her. “Whatever you think you're about to do, forget it. Turn around and go back to your quarters, and things will be back to normal before you know it.”

The grin slipped from her face, and her eyes hardened. It was more than a little intimidating, even on such a tiny pony. Her horn glowed, but she didn't seem to be doing anything with it.

“Hey,” Lemonwood said, taking a step forward, “aren't you the filly who let our Velvet get lost outside?” Her voice was tight and angry.

Oh. Shit. Evening Breeze moved up beside his partner and advanced. If they actually stopped Velvet Remedy's accomplice, maybe they could—

The mare's horn glowed brighter.

Something very hard and very heavy slammed against his head from behind, and the room suddenly reorientated such that he was lying face-down. Everything became very far away.

Beside him, Lemonwood let out a low moan. Breeze had taken the brunt of the blow, but the locker was heavy enough that she still felt like pieces of her skull were missing.

Evening Breeze's last thoughts before dropping into unconsciousness were that he probably wouldn't be a security officer anymore. Not after this embarrassment.

Lemonwood's last thoughts were that being a security officer was a raw deal. A swanky uniform and extra rations were not worth being smacked around with storage lockers.

They were both right, in a sense.

Stable Two was a hard place to keep clean. The slow trickle of treated air that was pumped in from the surface did nothing to expunge centuries of accumulated dust and grime, and, more distressingly, it did absolutely nothing for the smell.

The Stable's custodial crew were overworked and underappreciated, so they were thrilled to supplement their ranks with two new recruits, who they of course saddled with mops and brooms and set to work during the quietest, most convenient time of day. Namely, the middle of the night.

“This is absolutely your fault,” Lemonwood growled past the duster handle in her mouth.

Evening Breeze just sighed and trudged past her, dragging his mop behind him. His new custodian uniform was loose around his gut and shoulders, and with every step he felt the urge to curl up in a ball and hide within the excess fabric. How had things fallen apart so badly, so quickly?

Lemonwood flicked her duster into the air, raising a thick cloud of dust. “I can't believe I lost my shitty job with its shitty hours and immediately got one that's even worse with the exact same hours! What kind of messed up game is Valour playing with us?”

“I'm just glad they let us stay in the Stable at all,” Evening said. He dunked his mop into a bucket and swirled it around. Was that even how he was supposed to do it? He'd never mopped a floor before. Clearly, Lemonwood was in a similar boat. She slapped her duster against a pipe a few times, ran it along the wall, and shook it vigorously over the floor.

They were probably doing more harm than good.

Down the hallway, a door slid open and an overhead light clicked on above it. Two stallions stepped out. They headed away from Lemonwood and Evening Breeze, toward the Stable's exit.

Breeze stared after them, still as a statue, the mop still hanging from his mouth.

Behind him, Lemon snorted. “Another one, huh? I'm so surprised.”

“Three shifts in a row?” Evening Breeze said in a small voice. “How is this happening?”

Lemonwood stepped up and patted his shoulder with a hoof. “Hey, it's all right. Remember, we aren't security anymore. We don't have to do a Luna-damned thing.”

The couple rounded a corner and disappeared from sight. Evening let out a long breath. “You're right. F-fuck it.” He bit down on the mop handle and jerked it out of the bucket, spraying a wide arc of water across the floor.

They worked in silent solidarity for a while. Lemonwood fantasized about how unimpressed their new supervisor was going to be come morning, when he saw the fruits of their labour. Evening Breeze tried to guess who the next dozen or so self-made exiles were going to be, starting with the artists. He wasn't far off the money, as it turned out.

Distant lights at the end of the hallway turned on again, and both former officers looked up. A single pony made his way toward them, activating more lights with every few strides. Soon he was close enough for them to see his face.

It was a security pony, one of their old coworkers. Deadbolt.

“Hey guys!” he said cheerfully. He waved. “How's it going?”

Lemonwood said, “Not great.”

“Pretty terrible, actually,” Evening agreed.

“No kidding,” said Deadbolt. “I can't believe they reallocated you 'cause of one mistake.”

Evening cleared his throat. “They probably count it as two. We were on duty when Velvet left.”

“Oh. Wow.” Deadbolt blinked a few times, clearly reassessing them. “Anyway, could I ask you guys for a quick favour?”

Evening Breeze nodded. “Of course! Always happy to help a fellow officer.”

“Kill me,” Lemonwood grumbled.

“Great!” Deadbolt said. He held up his PipBuck. “Do you still have the encryption key for the section doors? The file's corrupted on mine or something, and I need it to finish my patrol.”

Evening Breeze was already scrolling through files on his own PipBuck. “I've definitely still got it. Had to use it a couple times tonight, so it should be near the top…” He shuffled closer and gestured. “Here, get your data cable out.”

“Gay,” Lemonwood said in a deadpan.

Everyone continued to ignore her.

“You know,” Evening said as he tapped a few buttons, “we thought you two were going to the surface or something when you first went by.”

“Hah!” Deadbolt laughed, maybe a little too hard. “That'd be rich. Three escapes in three nights.”

“That's what I said!”

Both PipBucks beeped, and Deadbolt disconnected the cable. “You're a life-saver, Breeze. I'm sure you'll be back on the team before you know it.”

“I hope so.” He saluted. “Enjoy your shift!”

“You too.” Deadbolt turned and cantered back down the hallway. He seemed a little rushed.

Lemonwood glanced between Evening Breeze and the departing stallion. “I can't believe you're still such an ass-kisser.”

“Forgive me if I actually want my job back some day.”

Lemonwood rolled her eyes.

They returned to their tasks, one of them trying much harder than the other, but ultimately making the same progress, or lack thereof. The floor got much wetter, no matter how much Evening dragged his mop across it. He emptied four more buckets, but nothing seemed to be working. Meanwhile, Lemonwood worked on spreading what dust she could find as evenly as possible, until every surface, nook, and cranny was coated in a nearly perfect layer. It was a delicate process that involved a lot of flailing and patting motions.

Indeed, the two were somehow even worse at cleaning than they were at their previous job.

It wasn't until near the end of their shift, just after 5 A.M., that they were escorted by security to the Overmare's office, and questioned about one Deadbolt, and his partner, Twinkletaps. What they'd talked about, and which files Evening had transferred, and why they had not only failed to stop two more ponies from leaving the Stable, but actively helped them this time.

Many hurtful words were flung across the table in both directions.

At least by the end of the interrogation, they were given the good news that they wouldn't have to clean hallways anymore.

Well, not exactly.

The majority of Stable Two was buried nearly fifty yards below ground. Even the exit led to a narrow, twisting tunnel that wound up through the earth and emerged in a basement. Lemonwood and Evening Breeze were much, much lower than that.

The two disgraced public servants sat, back to back, in a cramped maintenance corridor. The deepest reaches of the Stable weren't well lit, they weren't air conditioned, and they weren't spacious. Even Stable technicians and engineers only ventured down this far when absolutely necessary, and they worked as fast as possible until they could leave. Lemon and Evening would be there all day.

Decades prior, small, rarely-used sections of the maintenance levels were sealed and abandoned to reduce the Stable's power consumption. And for decades, nopony had given those condemned sections a second thought. Now, as Stable Two entered its two-hundredth year, supplies and materials were starting to run thin, including basic things like screws, extra piping, and electrical tape, and less basic things, like circuit boards and backup terminals. Unsealing and salvaging these sections was apparently one of the current Overmare's biggest pet projects.

And now she had the perfect expendables to dump it on.

“At least it's a day shift,” Evening Breeze said. He looked down at his lunch. The sandwich was cold, and the lettuce was already wilting, and he was pretty sure there was some engine grease on the crust.

Lemonwood stared down the long corridor, at the door she could just barely make out. It led to a staircase that wound up, up, and up, all the way to the Stable's atrium. Food, company, light, and air. “It doesn't feel like day,” she croaked. She'd gotten a few lungfuls of dust from their first steps into the abandoned rooms, and her throat was still burning.

Evening took a tentative bite of his sandwich, swallowed, and gagged. He tossed the rest of it aside.

“You can't just leave that there.”

“Watch me.” He stood and dusted crumbs off his sleeves. “Come on, let's get started. It can't be worse than sitting around in the dark.”

“I'll have you know that sitting around in the dark is one of my favourite pastimes,” Lemonwood shot back, but she also stood up and faced the pitch-black portal into Stable Two's past, and their immediate future.

With a click, Evening's PipBuck light turned on, and he held his leg up high. Just another hallway, albeit one with fewer pipes than the rest of the maintenance levels.

“Remind me why you wanted to start with this one?”

“It's the deepest. Nowhere to go but up, right?”

Lemonwood winced. “Sure thing, let's start with the most haunted one first. Brilliant as always, Breeze.” She activated her own PipBuck lamp and stepped inside. The temperature immediately dropped a degree or two, and the damp air tickled her lungs. “Eugh. You know, deepest probably also means wettest, right? If we're up to our shoulders in groundwater by the end of this—”

“You're welcome to pick a different door, but we'll have to do this one eventually.”

“We could get lucky and die first,” Lemonwood muttered. At least the floor seemed dry so far. They carried on, Lemon in the lead.

“They could have at least sent a unicorn with us. How are we supposed to see anything down here with just our lamps?”

“The Overmare's probably hoping we die down here too.”

The hallway ended at another sealed door. Evening shuffled past his partner and withdrew a cutting torch. It was effectively a low-powered energy lance, and it made short work of the welded steel. The high-pitched whine of magical plasma against the horrible rattle of low-quality steel was music to Lemonwood's ears. Awful, brain-piercing music.

Then something tapped Lemonwood on the shoulder, she screamed, and years of security training kicked in immediately. She hit the ground like a sack of bricks.

“Lemon?” Evening said, and turned to peer down at the sprawl of limbs behind him. “Are you…” he glanced up, at the pony standing in the middle of the corridor. “Uh…”

It was a unicorn, and a mare, probably, but in the murky light that was all he could tell for sure. A pair of saddlebags rested on her back.

Evening retreated, his rump bumping against the closed door. “Who the fuck are you?” His voice only jittered a little.

The unicorn ducked her head. “Oh, sorry,” she said, apologetic but not nervous in the slightest. “I don't come down here often and now I think I'm lost.”

“Ya think?” Lemonwood said, and struggled back to her hooves. “This isn't even a real maintenance tunnel.” She lifted her leg, and the combined glare of two PipBucks was just enough to shed light on the mare's identity.

Evening blinked. “Palette? What are you doing down here?”

The painter shrugged. “I told you, I'm lost.”

“No, what are you doing down here at all? It's not like the Overmare's commissioning murals on the maintenance level.”

“Yeah,” Lemonwood said. “Why aren't you sneaking out of the Stable or something?”

“Excuse me?” Palette took a step back. “Why would you say something like that?”

Evening nodded. “Yeah, she was top of my list. Velvet and Twinkletaps are gone, so that only leaves a hoofful of artists left.”

Palette glanced between them, a scowl deepening on her face. “I'm standing right here!”

Lemonwood rolled her eyes. “We know. We're ignoring you.”

“Why?”

“Cause I haven't talked to anypony in four days who wasn't either trying to leave the Stable or yelling at me for letting somepony leave the Stable!”

Evening said, “What about me?”

“Fuck off.”

“Right, sorry.”

Palette cocked her head and glanced between the two earth ponies. She shifted her weight, bit her lip, and finally said, “Okay, I have a confession. I'm not lost, and I am trying to leave the Stable.” She stepped forward and lifted her own PipBuck up. A low-resolution map of the Stable flickered over the dim screen. “I think there's a secret exit down here.”

A moment passed in absolute silence.

“You guys aren't, um, undercover security or something, are you?”

Lemonwood's head turned at a glacial pace, and her dumbfounded gaze met Evening Breeze's own.

She cracked first. “Pfffffttt, heh, hah,” she gasped, her lungs suddenly empty.

“Hah! Haha hahahaha!”

“Tch, hah, heh.”

“Fffft, hah. Undercover.”

“Undercover security! Can you, phffft, imagine?”

“Ooof, fuck everything,” Evening said as he struggled for air. “Yeah, we're undercover security. That's why we're wading through cobwebs in the Stable's rectum.”

“The Overmare just trusts us so much, she couldn't decide which top-secret exit we should guard!”

Palette's nose wrinkled. “This is getting weird. If you're not security, can I just…” She shuffled forward a few steps. “Just slip on by and be out of your manes?”

Evening cleared his throat and straightened. He was just broad enough to take up most of the hallway when he wanted to. “Uh, hold on.” He glanced at Lemonwood and raised an eyebrow.

“What?” she asked.

He nodded to Palette, then raised both eyebrows.

“I don't understand you.”

Evening ground his teeth. He raised a hoof, jabbed it in Palette's direction, then pumped both shoulders in an exaggerated shrug.

Lemonwood turned to Palette. “Do you have any clue what he wants?”

Palette's ears twitched, and she opened her mouth.

“I'm asking, 'what should we do?'” Evening Breeze finally growled.

“Oh!” Lemonwood said, nodding and smiling. “See, I thought you were asking something way dirtier than that.” She turned and regarded Palette, brow pinched and eyes narrowed. “I mean, I guess we take her to Valour, right?” She didn't sound very sure.

“Please don't,” said Palette.

Evening nodded slowly. “They can't be mad at us for doing our job.” He let out a long, slow sigh.

“Well, technically,” Lemonwood said, and licked her lips. “Technically, that's not our job anymore, remember? Two demotions in a row.”

“Good point, good point. Two new jobs in two days. It's starting to get hard to keep track of. And who could blame us?”

“The Overmare could.”

“Mmm. Mhm,” Evening hummed in agreement.

Palette wasn't exactly placated. She retreated a few more steps. Her horn glowed platinum blue.

“Don't!” Evening and Lemon shouted together, already ducking and covering their heads with their hooves. They glanced backward to find not a single storage locker in sight.

“We won't tell anypony,” Lemonwood said quickly. “Not even if the Overmare asks us directly.”

Evening nodded. “You can trust us. After all, there isn't really anywhere left for her to demote us to.” He gestured down to his unlabeled Stable barding and lack of badge and ornamentation. “See, this isn't even a real position.”

Palette stopped, peered, and considered. “So you're not security, and you're not maintenance…” She looked around, at the dark, abandoned hallway, and back, at the door they'd unsealed minutes ago. “What is your job?” she asked.

Evening Breeze and Lemonwood exchanged a look.

“You say you've got a map of this place?”

“And a horn to light the way?”

They leaned in together. “Mind if we share?”

They kicked in the door together, which all in all was probably overkill, since the hinges weren't much more than ash once Evening's plasma cutter was applied. Still, it felt like an important team building moment.

Dust poured into the air, rendering the light from Palette's horn useless.

Evening Breeze and Lemonwood proceeded forward anyway.

Seconds inside the doorway, there was a loud thwack. “Fuck!” Lemonwood cursed, and hopped backward on three legs. “Oh piss, that sucks.”

“Banged your shin?”

“Yeah, of course I did.” She cursed a few more times and flexed her leg. She settled some weight on it and winced. “Yup, that's a bruise for sure.”

Palette trotted up beside them. The dust began to settle, and the light spell filled the room. Large tanks lined the walls, and small pools of water gathered in the grooves around them. Pipes ran along the walls and across the ceiling. They looked down, at a pipe that jutted off the wall, cracked and corroded, directly in front of the door. It was split in half, forming a circular mouth of sharp, filthy metal, like a snake waiting for prey.

Lemonwood glanced down at her sore, unpunctured leg and took a few steps back.

“Maybe wait until we can see next time,” Palette suggested.

“I like that idea,” Lemonwood agreed shakily.

The walls of piping ran toward the far end of the room. They all slanted slightly downward.

Evening turned to Palette. “So, according to your map, how far does this tunnel go?”

“Hard to say.” She lifted her leg and tapped the screen to turn on the backlight. “It's kind of a maze down here.” Palette offered the screen to them. Indeed, rooms and passages intersected, doubled back, sloped up and down, forming at least three different floors stacked atop one another. Nestled toward the outside edge of the map was a small marker. Outside.

Evening winced, and Lemon groaned aloud. “We're so fucked,” she muttered, and walked forward into the room.

“Okay, how about you concentrate on keeping us in the right direction, and we'll keep our eyes peeled for tetanus syringes,” Evening said to Palette. “Maybe we'll get lucky and make it there sometime this week.”

Palette nodded and squinted hard at her PipBuck. “At least if it does take us that long, there's no way security will find us.”

“Find our corpses, you mean,” Lemonwood said from across the room. She peered into the next room. “Looks like we're going down.”

Evening rolled his eyes. Palette shivered.

The door at the far end of the room led to another hallway, although, true to Lemon's words, it sloped downward at a steep angle. They all felt the stress in their lower legs as they descended.

“Looks like this passage curves right, then…” The sound of hooves on steel floor pounded through the narrow hallway. “Uh, that's probably not… hmm.”

“What?” Evening Breeze asked.

“Oh, um, nothing.”

Lemonwood and Evening Breeze both drew up short.

“Okay, it's not nothing. It looks like we need to go up. Straight up.”

“How far up?” Lemon said.

Palette's muzzle scrunched. “Hard to say. Too far, I think.”

They followed the hallway's bend and hit a dead end. Not a room, just a flat, featureless metal wall. As one, their gazes ran upward.

Lemonwood snickered. “Fuck off.”

There was a small, square opening in the ceiling, nearly ten feet above their heads. A perfectly black hole into the sky. A few hours in the future, Palette might look back on that image and consider it poetic.

“Yeah, I don't think—” Evening started.

Palette glared at her PipBuck, then at the narrow opening in the ceiling, then at the floor. Her gaze landed on the two former security officers, and her expression lifted. She looked back up at the open panel appraisingly.

“I bet there's a ladder in there. Or something. It wouldn't be on the map like this otherwise.”

“Unless it's supposed to be a secret backup exit, so only an official, organized, well-supplied group can get through,” Lemonwood argued. “You know, with groups of unicorns to levitate ponies, or folding ladders. Maybe a friggin' lamp to see shit better.”

Palette stepped forward and aimed her horn at the ceiling. It's omnidirectional glow narrowed slightly, and cast long, soft shadows up the vertical shaft. “Looks like a ladder to me,” she said. Indeed, the faint silhouettes of ladder rungs, bolted to one wall, were unmistakable.

Evening sighed. “That's great, but ladders aren't very helpful when they're ten feet above your head.”

Palette looked over both of her companions again, sizing them up. “Boost me,” she said.

“Uh, maybe you didn't notice, but we're not any taller than you,” Lemonwood said, gesturing between herself and Evening Breeze. “You wouldn't make it even if we threw you.”

“Unless you have some fancy unicorn trick we don't know about,” Breeze said, doubtfully.

Honestly, Palette was a little offended by that.

“I was imagining more of a pony pyramid.”

Lemonwood narrowed her eyes. “With you on top, obviously?”

“That's usually how I prefer it.”

“Didn't need to know that,” Lemon said, but she glanced upward, then at Evening, following her reasoning. “But fine. It might work.”

Evening Breeze sighed, and his shoulders slumped. “I'm going to be on the bottom, aren't I?”

“Oh yeah, just like always.”

It wasn't exactly elegant. Evening Breeze nearly toppled over sideways when Lemonwood climbed onto his back, then Palette pointed out that they weren't quite underneath the hole. His legs nearly buckled as he repositioned, and then Lemonwood slipped and had to dance in place to keep her balance. At least, that was her excuse.

Palette planted her fore hooves on Evening's rump, shakily dragged a hind leg up, and then jumped, draping herself over Lemonwood's back.

“F-fuck,” Evening whimpered. His legs shook, and the whole tower shook with him.

Lemonwood ground a hoof into his shoulders. “Stand still, idiot. We're nearly there.”

“Ow,” he breathed.

“Much better.”

Finally—or much too quickly, if you asked Lemonwood—Palette gathered her hooves beneath her and stretched up, grasping the first rung tightly.

“Got it?” Lemon asked.

“Yeah, I…” Palette strained, heaved, and utterly failed to reach the next rung. “Another inch or two, please.”

“Please?” Evening gasped. “Now she says please?”

“Okay, I'm going to jump. Push off my back or something,” Lemonwood said, bending her knees and bracing her hooves on Evening Breeze's spine.

Palette tightened her grip on the rung and spaced her hind legs on Lemon's back. “Ready!”

“I did nothing to deserve this,” Evening muttered, just to himself.

“One, two, three!” Lemonwood kicked off the unfortunate pony below and popped a good two feet upward. A half-second later, the weight left her back in turn.

Evening and Lemonwood crashed to the ground in a pile of limbs, manes, and tails. Of course, Lemon landed mostly on top of her partner. He didn't even make a sound.

A second later, when no third pony joined their pathetic puddle of painful pony parts, Lemonwood gathered herself and rolled over. “Palette?”

“I'm almost at the top!” she called. “You two okay?”

“A little bruised,” Lemonwood answered. “Although Breeze seems fine.”

Again, not a peep. Lemon hoped he wasn't actually dead.

“Okay, I think I can—”

There was the sound of scraping metal, and something lanced downward toward them, hard and fast and solid. Lemonwood rolled out of the way in the blink of an eye to the sound of a steel ladder smashing against a steel floor. She leapt to her hooves and spun around.

Evening Breeze was just as motionless as before, albeit now he had a solid metal rail on either side of his head. The bottom rung rested a few precious centimeters over his muzzle. He sighed. “And here I was hoping for a swift death.”

“Oops, sorry!” Palette called down. “I didn't think it would just drop like that!”

“Don't worry, we're good,” Lemon replied, already starting her ascent. “Come on, Evening. I wanna get there before our shift ends.”

They gathered around a sealed door. After hours of navigating the lower levels, they knew the procedure pretty well. Evening Breeze withdrew his plasma cutter, and Lemonwood and Palette looked down at Palette's PipBuck.

“We're close,” Lemonwood noted.

“Yup. This is the last room. I think.”

Burning metal and magical resonance filled the space, drowning out almost every other sensation.

“It's hard to believe I'm actually about to leave the Stable,” Palette said.

Lemonwood nodded. “Hard to believe I'm actually about to complete a shift without something horrible happening.”

Evening Breeze wrenched the plasma cutter out of the door and switched it off. “Aren't you both being a little premature? This is probably the part where Palette's secret password doesn't work, or the Overmare herself is there waiting for us.”

Palette shivered. “Ugh, don't say that. Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” both Lemonwood and Evening Breeze replied.

“Guh.”

Evening pushed the door open, and Palette angled her magic light inside.

They gasped.

“Kinda looks like a bathroom,” said Evening Breeze, breaking the silence.

“Pretty sure it is a bathroom,” Lemonwood said. She walked over to one side of the room, where a series of evenly spaced pipes emerged from the floor and jutted into the room. They were all haphazardly capped off, and there were grout marks around them in small circles. She tapped a pipe with a hoof. “Toilets.”

The room was ringed with more collections of dead-end pipes, some at sink-height, some in the floor. On the far end of the room, there was an alcove that presumably used to be for showering. Aside from the bony spurs of ancient plumbing, the room was bare and empty.

Palette frowned. “Stable Two's emergency exit is in a decommissioned bathroom? That's so… unromantic.”

“I mean, if they wanted to keep people from looking around too closely, a run-down stallion's bathroom is the way to go.”

“How can you tell it's a stallion's bathroom?” Evening asked.

“Because it's disgusting. I don't think a mare's bathroom could get this gross even after decades of neglect.”

Palette made the mistake of peering into a nearby corner. Her upper lip twitched involuntarily. “I've never wanted to get out of the Stable more than I do at this exact second. Come on, help me look.”

“Aaaaaand this is starting to feel like a demotion again,” Evening Breeze muttered as he brought his face close to the mouldy pipes. “If I end up with old piss on my muzzle—”

“It'll be no different from any other Thursday night for you,” Lemonwood snapped back. “Shut up and find the door.”

Evening stopped in his tracks and frowned. “Are… are you saying that I… drink old piss? Or—”

“It's just a burn, stop reading so much into it.”

“Sorry.”

He went back to examining the walls.

It was hard to look for secret panels or hidden switches with only the soft light from Palette's horn, but they all did their best. Of course, the pony with the head-mounted lamp was the one to finally find something.

“Guys, I think I found something.”

They hurried over.

Palette was standing at the entrance to the shower room, her hooves inches from the grate that served as its floor. The slits were narrow, but they could dimly see a tunnel a few feet beneath it, leading off into even more darkness.

Lemonwood shook her head and turned around. “Oh no, I'm not going down there. You know what ponies do in the shower.”

Evening sighed, and said, “It's always all sex jokes and weird insults with you, then when it's time to crawl through some crusty jizz you turn into a prude.”

Palette made a strange sound at the back of her throat. “I'm starting to think that you two aren't coherent individuals. You're some kind of dual headed personality disorder.”

Lemon turned back around with a small grin. “Maybe you've gone crazy down here, and we're both warring aspects of your personality trying to keep you alive.”

“No, that's not it.” She turned her attention to the grate. Her magic tugged at its edges. “C'mon, help me lift this.”

Evening shook his head and started forward. “It's bolted down. I'll just cut through it.”

A few quick swipes of the plasma cutter and a sharp kick, and the grate crashed down into the passage below. “Ladies first,” he said.

Lemonwood sneered. “Eat my ass.”

She jumped down. Palette followed. Evening Breeze took up the rear.

The tunnel was barely wide and tall enough for an adult pony to walk upright, and it went on for what seemed like miles but was probably only a few dozen yards.

“Door,” Palette said, at last. The party ground to a halt.

“A Stable door?” Evening said, relief in his voice.

“We're inside a Stable, dummy. Every door's a Stable door.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, and yes,” said Palette. “It's a big cog thing. Well, not big. It's a mini-Stable door.”

“Can you open it?”

“Let me check.” She groped around until she found a small terminal screen. With a quick flurry of telekinetic key presses, there was a hiss of compressed air, and the door rolled open.

They all stepped back wordlessly. Lemonwood and Evening Breeze peered around Palette's sides, and the unicorn raised her head and illuminated the beyond.

At the lowest point in the Stable, beneath thousands of tons of earth and metal, in the plumbing of an old bathroom drain, the three ponies drank in their first look of the world outside. Palette nearly whimpered in excitement. Both former security ponies squinted, as if afraid the sheer otherness of whatever they saw might overwhelm them.

“Stairs,” Lemonwood said. “Those are stairs.”

Palette hiccuped out a laugh. “Not just stairs!” She boldly cantered forward, up the first flight of stairs and onto the landing. She braced herself, then turned around and peered up the next flight. “Uh… Not just stairs!” She trotted up, around the bend and out of sight.

Evening Breeze and Lemonwood stepped into the stairwell. There was no gap between the flights, just dust and concrete: the kind of stairs you could run up, back and forth, without any clue when you'd reach the top.

“Anything?” Evening Breeze called.

Palette's voice replied, muffled and distant. She must have already climbed several flights. “I'm… keep going! Password… see-em-see three-bee-eff-eff!”

Lemon and Evening exchanged a look. They waited. The sound of Palette's hoofsteps faded. They turned on their PipBuck lamps in the absence of her horn light.

Five minutes later, Evening Breeze muttered, “Welp, she's gone.”

“Yeah. Kinda rude, honestly.”

“And what was that thing she yelled? See my see?”

Lemonwood started forward, toward the base of the steps, while Evening took a step back, toward the miniature Stable door. His rump hit steel.

He let out a sharp whinny, and whirled on the offending surface. His veins froze over. “Uh, Lemon, I think…” He turned, and Lemonwood was already out of sight up the stairs.

“Door closed behind us, right?” she called.

“Y-yes. Somehow we didn't even—”

“Notice, right. Too distracted by the stairs.” She trotted back into view, shoulders slumped. “I feel like we should have at least seen this one coming.”

“Shit. Shit. We're going to end up outside, aren't we? Fuck, we already are outside.” He kicked at the door with a vicious hind leg. The clank thundered through the tiny concrete stairwell.

Lemonwood barely mustered a shrug. “Again, should have seen it coming. We've gone with the flow ever since this stuff started, and the flow is obviously headed up there. I guess we're going to die.” She snorted. “Okay, I actually did call that one.”

They were quiet for a long moment. Evening Breeze lay down. Lemonwood squatted on a step halfway down the first flight of stairs. The sheer aimlessness in the room was overwhelming. Funny, since they'd never had so few avenues open to them. It was either up or nowhere.

Evening Breeze breathed in deeply, exhaled slowly, and relaxed. He stood up, stretched his joints, and smiled. With slow, dramatic strides, he approached the stairs.

He said, “You're right. Everything's pushing us out of the Stable, so maybe we should stop drifting with the flow and get out ahead of it.” He raised his muzzle skyward and closed his eyes. “How many ponies get an opportunity like this?”

“Lots, apparently,” Lemon remarked. “Like, five in the last week, or something. I'm losing track now.” She hadn't moved from her seat.

“My whole life, I just accepted that I'd never leave. That I'd live and die in Stable Two. But you know what? I don't think I want that anymore. I want to see what's out there. I want to be something more than a security officer, or even security chief! The world's just sitting up there, waiting for us to experience it!”

Lemonwood lifted her head, and half-rose to her hooves.

“You feel it too, right? Maybe this is where we belong. Not crawling through old bathrooms, not dusting common areas, not guarding empty hallways. We belong to—”

“Is that a control panel?” Lemon asked suddenly. She stared over his shoulder, at the sealed door.

“—to… huh?” Evening Breeze turned and followed her gaze. “Huh. Yeah, that's… that's the same as on the other side.”

They both stared at the little terminal in dumb silence, trying to figure out what to do with it.

“Palette was yelling the password, wasn't she?”

“Yes. She even said the word 'password.'”

“Should have put that together faster.”

“Yeah.”

Lemonwood walked up to the door and fumbled at the keypad. “What was it? CMC… three?”

“3BFF. I remember thinking that it was some kind of dumb acronym at the end.”

A few more pecks at the terminal, and the door hissed and swung open.

“Well,” Evening Breeze said. He looked into the familiar hallway on the other side.

“Uh huh. So all that stuff about our purpose or whatever?”

“Right. Never mind then.”

And they went back inside.

Things went back to normal pretty fast.

Nopony was able to figure out when or how Palette had left. As far as the rest of the Stable was aware, she just disappeared one night. They were used to artists disappearing by then, and compared to Velvet Remedy she wasn't popular enough to hold anypony's attention for long. Lemonwood and Evening didn't see any reason to illuminate them.

It took a few weeks for them to fully explore and document the decommissioned section of the Stable. The results were less than stellar. Most of the metal was either rusted or warped from years of unchecked water exposure. Once their work was checked over by respected, competent engineers and inventory clerks, the Overmare cancelled the project and turned her attention back toward the quotidian problems of Stable life.

Either nopony noticed or nopony cared that Lemon and Evening were never reassigned. They ate breakfast at the cafeteria like everypony else, and socialized in the common areas in the afternoon. They went back to their private quarters in the evenings and slept through the night. During the day, they wandered, sometimes together, sometimes alone.

“Do you ever miss being in security?” Evening Breeze asked one night as they left the cafeteria together. “You know, having some authority, some purpose.”

“Here we go again with your great sense of purpose. We live down here. We're going to die down here, just like everypony else. If you want some variety, go explore maintenance again. Sometimes new stuff breaks and it's almost like walking into a different place for once.”

He huffed. “Remind me why I still hang out with you?”

“You like friends?” she said, grinning.

“You are an asshole.”

They walked, passing sleepy-eyed ponies lurching toward their precious seven hours of sleep between days of dreary work.

“So you don't miss having a job at all?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes. “I kind of miss exploring the bottom levels, but we've already charted everything down there, so this is the next best thing.”

“The next best thing after exploring abandoned tunnels is doing nothing?”

“Yup!” Lemonwood stopped next to her bedroom door and tapped the control panel. “If you want your old job back so bad, go ask for it.” She ducked inside. The door closed.

Evening Breeze meandered down the hallway, turning corners randomly. He didn't miss his old job. He missed the job he used to pretend he had. Guarding things with real value from real interlopers. That was what security should be about. But Stable Two wasn't like that. The most exciting thing to happen in his lifetime was a few desperate romantics sneaking outside.

He arrived at his room, removed his barding as he crossed the floor, and flopped into bed.

As Evening drifted off to sleep, he imagined ponies in steel armor standing guard over precious and important things. Magic artifacts, maybe, or dangerous technology. Something bigger than Stable Two could deal with.

Two hallways over, Lemonwood pictured herself delving through treacherous ruins, dodging traps and foiling monsters in search of something rare and interesting.

They never considered using the secret exit and venturing outside. Why would they? What were the odds that there was some kind of highly organized faction up there, perfectly suited for both of them, thriving and desperate for new recruits. So they spun their wheels underground, as if waiting for that faction to come to them.

Author's Note

Thanks to Chaotic Dreams and NyxOS for pre-reading.

Oil on Canvas

My first steps outside were everything I'd dreamed. The wind blew through my mane almost like a fan. But fans were consistent, concentrated, and you could avoid them by moving away a few yards. The wind was everywhere, and the air it carried was cool and sweet, despite the vague scent of decay. I basked in the expanse around me, sky and earth in every dimension, an infinite canvas with infinite detail stretching as far as the eye could see and further.

Stable Two's door behind me closed with a quiet click, which might have been a locking mechanism, trapping me outside forever. I didn't know, and I didn't check. I didn't care. There was nothing for me inside.

Without a second thought, I dropped my saddlebags to the ground and levitated out a sketchpad and a stick of graphite. I would have to be gentle; there was a lot of grey here. But unlike the ubiquitous, bureaucratic grey of the Stable's walls, this grey was a gradient, from the clouds above to the charred trees around to the swaying stalks of dead grass below, and it was enough for now. I would look for colour soon.

Stroke by stroke, I etched out a landscape. A forest of bare and shivering trees lined the horizon, nearly obscuring the rolling hills that broke into mountains beyond. The field came out darker than I'd intended; shadows lurked beneath the grass, sheltered from the light like creatures of the deep. The sky I was scared to touch. Even a gentle swipe with the graphite risked obliterating the careful interplay of light and shade I beheld. I should have tried anyway, of course. I wouldn't learn anything by not trying. But trying also meant failing, and my first piece above ground shouldn't be a failure.

Minutes passed while I examined my work, looking for corners to sharpen or blur, holes to fill, values to amplify, and I carefully closed the spiral bound book and returned it to my bags. My bags returned to my back, and I started off across the field.

Stable Two seemed to be bleeding ponies like a poorly scabbed wound. First Velvet, then Littlepip. Twinkletaps and Deadbolt a few weeks later. And now me. It hadn't even been difficult. Of course something as well designed as a Stable would have an emergency exit. A bit of innocuous digging into the Overmare's terminal had revealed that, and everything else I'd needed. Even if that hadn't worked, I could have followed Deadbolt's example and seduced a security officer. Thanks to Littlepip, they all knew the Stable door code now. I suspected I wouldn't be the last disillusioned pony to wander through this field.

I hopped over a wide ditch that was dug in an almost perfect circle between the field and the forest, and on the other side was the start of a road. More of a path, now, but I recognized the black and grey rock that was strewn all around, like the pavement in wartime paintings. The path wound through the forest, breaking off in places where nature had overtaken Equestrian engineering. I relished the feeling of life under my hooves, even if it was mostly dead life.

I crested a hill, and a breathtaking sight spread out before me. Buildings, slumped and sodden, more browns and greys and blacks, clustered into the footprint of a town. A town that had faced a cataclysm and not quite survived. I heard a beep, and glanced to my leg. Ponyville, said the device, was just up ahead.

Everypony knew that there was death on the surface. Bombs fell, everypony died, and the soil and the trees and the sky died along with them. It was archeology, history, an unprecedented fusion of the natural and the engineered. Like a picture of a cemetery, or a battlefield, there was a serene beauty about death.

I was prepared to see death when I left the Stable, I breathed it in and painted it out, and my spirits were high.

Ponyville didn't disappoint.

Window frames glittered around their edges, where tiny glass teeth were suspended, the glue and sealant performing their job flawlessly in the face of time. Wood cracked and sagged, roofs were missing, doors hunched on stoops, their hinges rusted or forced apart. The buildings weren't painted any more, and their bare walls greedily absorbed as much light as they could, and the clouds above condensed and descended, leaving the town in gritty, smokey shade. From the size of the town, the size of the buildings, the soft, open sightlines from house to house and road to road, this place had been friendly once. Cheery.

I sucked down a breath of cold air and shivered even as the fire in my chest licked at my bones. My heart pounded at the vividness of everything, and with every grain of dirt beneath my hooves and every derelict creak or groan, my senses flared and bloomed as though I was using them for the first time.

A lane stretched out beside me, the road widened, and small wooden shells gave way to true ruins. Proud businesses, offices, and homes were reduced to brown and grey bricks and planks, but for the most part their forms stood strong. I walked through an open doorway and breathed in the dust and mildew that floated through the entrance hall in clouds of tiny dark particles. I ran a hoof over a stucco wall, tracing the line where the material had torn away to reveal mold and wood. I went to the corner and turned to see the room from another angle, with unfocused eyes. Dim light spilled in through the doorway, barely reaching beyond the frame before suffocating.

On the wall beside the door, in crude, bold, black paint, was an image. In bizarre proportions, two equine bodies were contorted together, lines bisecting shapes until all that remained clear was the intention.

Take, said the picture. Hold, grab, push, grope. Fuck.

A sobering flash slid down my throat and along my spine. I moved closer, until I could see the strokes, and the texture of the paint. This drawing wasn't two centuries old. With a tentative tendril of magic, I poked at the paint, and flakes fell to the floor. This was recent, within a year or two at least. Ponies lived up here, in this colourless wasteland. It was both reassuring and terrifying.

I left the building and moved deeper into Ponyville. The signs of life became more and more apparent. Trash filled the streets, pre-war food wrappers and glass bottles and scraps of something that looked like bark but was soft and supple like cloth. A tight, clammy part of my mind knew it was animal hide. There were more drawings too, many depicting similar scenes as the one in the house. Some were clear, like the violent or pornographic ones. Others made less sense. None were beautiful, but together they changed the broader painting.

From the top of the safest, sturdiest building I could find, I withdrew my sketchpad again and traced the lines of the rooftops. They formed the horizon. I wasn't hesitant with the sky this time, and carried it from milk white to stormcloud grey, and a little bit beyond. The perspective I chose set the whole town askew, as though the roads weren't straight and buildings were twisted and tilted by degrees. Some of the graffiti I copied directly. Some I reinterpreted. All in all, it made for a foreboding, even threatening, landscape.

When I finally looked up from the page and prepared to return to the street, I spotted movement. Maybe, if I wasn't an artist, my first impulse would have been to shrink back, to hide, and to sneak a glance once it was safe. But my curiosity won out, and I leaned over the edge of the building and craned my neck.

That was my first glimpse of the inhabitants of the surface, and also their first glimpse of me.

There were four of them, all stallions, ambling down the street toward me. They were dressed in mottled leather and torn cloth, and bulky metal implements hung awkwardly from their sides. None of them were big, or handsome, or even healthy looking, from their ragged manes and coats to their staggered, drunken gaits. In the fraction of a moment that I was fully visible, exposed, and honestly dumbfounded, one of them happened to glance my way.

A shout rang out, followed by a chorus of confusion from the others. The stallion who spotted me raced for cover, behind the remains of a post office wall. I didn't see what the others did, because I was already ducking back into concealment myself.

My heart pounded. The dark wall in front of me glowed with the afterimage of their dull and muted colours, like everything on the surface, except for the oily light that gleamed from the tools at their barrels. Ponies had survived the apocalypse, and so had guns. I struggled to control my breathing, to hear over my bodily functions for the stallions' inevitable approach.

Blips of light danced at the edges of my vision, and it took me a second to realize they weren't artefacts of my panicked mind but a long-forgotten and neglected feature of the PipBuck on my leg. A kind of radar filled my sight, and after turning my head a few times I reconciled the blips with directions and distances. Three were across the street, right next to each other. The last dot was moving, growing larger and slipping across my vision faster with each passing second. He was right below me, inside the house.

I didn't have much choice. I ran to the far side of the roof and looked across to the next building. It was a farther jump than I'd ever made, but I'd never had such convincing motivation before. The distance sailed underneath me, and I touched down and staggered across the house's roof. I looked around for a way down to the street, or to another building. There was an overhang that extended halfway down the building, on the far side away from my pursuers. It was made of thin wooden slats, some of which I could tell were badly rotten. I didn't hesitate.

The awning rushed toward me. I tried to flex my knees and distribute my weight when I landed, but it wasn't enough. There was a loud crack, and the platform lurched beneath me, and in the same second there was again nothing but air under my hooves. The ground crashed into me, leaving me limp and sprawling. Burst of colour flashed across my eyes, my ears rang, and everything from my legs to my ribs and stomach ached. I couldn't tell if there was still air in my lungs.

Ponies shouted behind me, their words muffled and formless. I couldn't quite hear their hoofsteps, but I could feel them, tentative at first, then galloping. I rolled over with a groan and tried to focus my vision. A putrid stench filled my nose and mouth, one of unwashed bodies and fetid breath, and I nearly gagged.

A filthy pony with a white coat and no mane stood over me, a bulky, brutish gun in his mouth. His eyes were filled with cruel mirth. He repositioned the gun to one corner of his mouth, then called over his shoulder, “Got the rope?”

“Is it her?” somepony out of sight asked.

“For fuck's sake, I told you this one was too big. The other one was a filly or something. And she's the wrong colour.” He looked over me again. “But she's got the same suit, and the thing on her leg. Maybe they're friends?”

The others cackled and jeered. Another pony, this one a unicorn, trotted past my head and stopped at my side. A length of rope floated next to him, surrounded in a warm orange aura. I flinched and started to turn, to get my hooves back under me and run, or fight. If I could get away from the town, and back to the forest, I could hide. My PipBuck was all the advantage I needed to avoid them, but first I had to escape.

The pony with the rope snarled and snapped out a leg. Pain exploded in my side, and I staggered, my knees nearly buckling. I turned for the open street.

An explosion of light and sound stopped me in my tracks. There was a smell in the air I didn't recognize, but I immediately knew it marked something dangerous.

“That's right. Nice and slow,” the gun-wielding pony said. He gestured with the gun toward the ground. “On your back, legs in the air.” He noticed my expression and his grin widened. “Don't worry, we won't hurt you. Not right now, anyway. We're gentleponies, see. It's bad manners to rut a mare out on the street.”

I hesitated, and he gestured with the gun again. I thought back to the graffiti all over the town, and the animal hide in the street, and I noticed the scars adorning these ponies. Life wasn't precious up here.

Slowly, and shaking, I dropped to the ground and did as he asked, and let my head roll back while they tied my hooves.

Buildings rose up all around, and they seemed to bend and lean toward me. Their windows, balconies, and overhanging roofs became cruel, mocking faces.

I'll admit, the image had character.

They half-dragged, half-carried me through the ruins, with my front slung over one of their backs and my hindlegs scraping along the ground. The rough and cracked road tore at my hooves, threatening to wear them down to nubs. My captors never stopped talking, swearing and laughing, but I was deaf to it. I was deaf and blind to the whole world.

For centuries we stayed below ground because we were told that the surface was deadly. Everyone had doubts, teenagers hung around the Stable doors and talked about freedom and rebellion, but deep down we all knew. Yet when I left the Stable, the danger was small in my mind, tucked away in a corner and queried from time to time. In all my imaginings about my first days above ground, I never thought about what I would do when things fell apart, never pictured all the ways a wild, lawless world could hurt me. During the trip to wherever these strange ponies were taking me, I spent some time making up for it.

We moved further into town, until the buildings opened up again into a kind of square. A ring of old businesses surrounded a section of dirt and paving stones, and on one side stood a massive tree, far larger than those I'd passed earlier. It was blackened and bare, but it's trunk and branches looked strong and intact, and in my numb, shocked state, I imagined a door and windows on its side, revealing glimpses of an interior.

The stallions tensed as we entered the square, and we skirted toward the far side of the ring from the tree. They moved quickly, their heads on a swivel. A few drew their weapons. As soon as we reached the far side and stepped back into the shelter of buildings, they relaxed. We were nearly there.

They dragged me through the doorway of a small, one story dwelling, and down a flight of stairs. I jerked at the incline, the bouncing, at the sensation of falling, but the stallion never stopped. There was no light down there, only the faint musk of rot and sweat, and it was cold, the coldest I'd ever been. My escort shuffled into the dark and grabbed something in his mouth, producing a horrible metal snarl. “Inside,” he grunted, and heaved me off his back.

I stumbled forward over uneven ground, fighting the ropes around my legs, and nearly faceplanted when my hooves caught on a sudden, ankle-high lip. I barely caught myself. I turned, trying to see or orient myself in some way. The menacing shape of my captor was all I could make out.

He growled. “Back of the cage. Now.”

I nearly did as he asked. Things were happening too fast, too drastically for my brain to keep up, and I felt a deep desire to lie down for a moment and think. But I could also feel the walls crowding around me, and the oppressive, frigid darkness that clouded all my senses like fog, and I knew that if I let the cage door close, this dungeon might be my last vision of the surface.

As far as I could tell, the stallion wasn't armed. The ropes were restricting, but the knots were loose, and a few good tugs would probably shake them free. As my eyes adjusted, I made out a dim shaft of light across the room, marking the stairs and exit. If I could get past this stallion, I could escape, and run, and return to Stable Two with my tail between my legs.

He growled again, probably his primary means of communication. And to be fair, they did come out pretty intimidating. I took an involuntary step backward, which was apparently enough for his purposes. He turned to one side and grabbed the cage door between his teeth. The metal screeched again.

The seconds hung in the air and my heart pounded as I made my decision. I lunged forward, my heart skipped a beat, and time suddenly rushed past in a blind torrent. I made it into the doorway of the cage and next to the stallion. The rope, loose and nearly ripped from my first steps, fell away entirely, allowing my legs total freedom. With my eyes fixed on the light from the stairway, I started to leap.

He caught me with his shoulder, shoved me sideways and into the side of doorway. Once again, the air flew from my lungs in a painful burst. I tried to shrink back, but he held me in place and ground my side into the metal edges. “Was wondering when I'd have to give it to you,” he said, muzzle inches from my ear, and released me with a vicious push toward the back into the cage. He stepped inside with me.

“You d-don't have to—” I swallowed. The dank air gathered in my chest, crushing my lungs and squeezing my throat. “I'll behave.”

A chuckle, then he lurched forward and lashed out a leg.

Pain exploded in my head, and the dark lit up with splashes of blinding colour. I crumpled to the floor and did my best to cover my face and barrel. Over the course of the next few minutes, my best turned out to not make much difference. I focused on the colours, trying to make recognizable images out of the swirling kaleidoscope behind my eyes.

Finally, miles away, the stallion spat, turned, and closed the cage door.

All too soon, the pain dulled a bit, and the colours faded, leaving me completely, unceasingly blind.

I shivered.

Hours later, by my PipBuck's clock, I was still alone. Whatever plans those monsters had for me, they apparently weren't urgent.

After the intense agony of the beating passed, the lasting injuries made themselves known. From the constant throbbing in my face, how it burned to breathe, and the crusted substance that covered my cheeks and upper lip, my nose was probably broken. In the same breath, tiny daggers stabbed at my chest and stomach. A broken rib, maybe? Or worse, some kind of damage to my intestines? Was that possible? I didn't know enough about medicine to guess. I didn't know much about so many of the things that were apparently important up here.

There was no point in trying to sleep. The ground was hard and ice-cold, and pain lanced up my spine and down my legs with each breath and movement. After wallowing in darkness and self-pity for a while, I remembered my PipBuck. I steadied myself, then flicked on the lamp, casting a wide beam of light across the basement.

The walls were rough and stained, and along them were more cages, their bars driven into the stone floor and topped with heavy metal plates. The ceiling was low, maybe six feet high, and the floor bulged and dipped at random. I angled the light toward the stairs, but all I could see was a recess in the wall that marked the landing. A closer look at the door to my cage revealed a small keyhole build directly into the metal, facing into the room. I could barely reach a hoof around and touch it. All of the metal looked solid, too. This was clearly built to contain intelligent creatures. Ponies.

A throb in my chest reminded me that I was hurt, and not the kind of hurt that I could sleep off. I flicked my PipBuck's display over to the status screen, and nodded. Crippled chest, damaged head. Nothing I didn't already suspect. Apparently I was also dehydrated, although for some reason I didn't feel it. I'd been above ground for less than five hours, and already I was closer to dead than I'd ever been before. But I didn't exactly have medical supplies or water down here, and I suspected the ponies upstairs wouldn't be eager to share.

I turned my thoughts outward again before they could start to spiral, and peered past the bars of my cage into the others. Most were empty, save for a couple of filthy wooden buckets or scattered dishware. I glanced behind me, and yes, there it was. A bucket all my own. That was a good sign, right? I was going to be here long enough to need a bucket, so they probably weren't going to kill me right away.

In the cage to my right, a lumpy shape drew my eye, and without thinking I cast my light toward it.

Laying on her side, unmoving, was a pony. Her coat was rough and matted, dusty to the point I couldn't make out the colour, and there were patches where ugly scars or festering wounds showed through. A shiver of revulsion passed through me, and I opened my mouth to say something. Then the smell hit me again. Rot, feces, spoiled meat. It filled the whole room, but it was strongest in the next cell, rolling off the mare in waves, and I nearly gagged when it touched the roof of my mouth. Nothing that smelled like that could be alive. I was locked up next to a corpse.

I was locked up next to a corpse, in the same room, the same trap as a corpse, and probably at the mercy of the same ponies who killed her.

I switched off my light and slunk to the back of the cage. The smell wouldn't leave my nose or my throat, and the cold sucked me down into the stone, and for once I was thankful of the dark. For a while, I fell into a kind of soothing daze, too numb to think, or to feel, or even remember. A lot of me wanted to stay there, and pretend that I could go to sleep and let everything fade away, maybe to wake up back in Stable Two, numb in a different, more pleasant way. But finally, I remembered the bucket. It didn't matter how long they kept me here, how long they left me alone, or how many times I got to use that bucket, because in the end I was going to die in this cage, like that poor mare next door.

I raised my head, then my leg. Both trembled, but my mind was awake and racing faster and faster as my panic rose again. I forced it down and focused. My PipBuck's map didn't cover much ground, but it was enough for me to see my escape route, if I could get through a couple doors and past several armed ponies. The building was labelled “Quills and Sofas,” and within was a door marked “Storage,” which had to lead down here. The building was far larger than I'd thought, clearly the remains of a store or warehouse. The surrounding area was tight and crowded, with narrow alleys and backroads running between the structures. It was hard to tell from a two-dimensional, monochrome map, but I guessed it would be the perfect place for a fleeing pony to disappear, with so many corners, nooks, and shortcuts at her disposal.

So, in theory, that would be the easy part. My cell, and then the room beyond, were obstacles both more immediate and perplexing. I scanned my cage again, drawing my eye over every crack and crag in the walls and floor, looking for a pin, a stick, anything to shove in a keyhole. Nothing but the stinking bucket, which was of course the most solid and dependable thing I'd seen in Ponyville so far, not even yielding a splinter despite my best efforts.

I gave the cage door an inquisitive punch. Pain rattled through my ribs, but the door barely shifted and only let out a low clang in response. Fine. I leaned forward and pressed my face against the bars, ignoring the flakes of rust and dried blood that clung to my cheeks, and continued looking for a suitable tool. My light cast deep shadows over the uneven ground, and no matter how I tilted or raised my PipBuck, there were crannies I couldn't quite see into. Something told me that I wasn't missing much. The floor was grimy and stained, but also swept clean. Perhaps they'd had escapees before.

There was solid wall to my left, and a quick inspection revealed nothing but rock and a series of shallow scratches. For a moment the scratches gave me hope—if a past prisoner had something sharp enough to scrape against the wall, maybe it was still here—but I soon realized, from the width and angle of the marks, that they'd been carved with the tip of a unicorn's horn. I ran a hoof along them and wondered how long it would take for me to start scraping messages into the walls with my horn. Not that I'd have to. I had a spell for that.

My mouth twisted into something of a smile, and I cast that very spell, tracing the lines on the wall with a hoof and painting them in with a pure-white pigment. The enchantment wouldn't last long, a day or two at most, but it had soothed me during my teenage years, when art supplies were a luxury and privilege afforded only to true Stable artists. The walls of my quarters would glow most hours of the day as I vomited my thoughts and moods with abandon. I hadn't needed to use the spell for a long time, but now I found it comforting to revisit.

Less comforting were the results of my restorations. I stepped back and grimaced at the message. A name, “Brisket”, and underneath a question mark followed by a series of parallel lines. The lines grew shakier and shallower from left to right, and the last was so slight and wobbly that at first I didn't realize it was part of the message. Fourteen days? Plus however many the question mark implied. That was too long for a simple death from dehydration. Starvation, maybe, or an infection or illness. Assuming of course that the unicorn's captors hadn't just bashed their head in one day.

On the bright side, ponies up here knew how to write. Or at least, this one had. And possibly only their own name. Still, it boded well for the possibility of some kind of civilization up here.

I cast another look around my cell, spending minutes picking over every square foot of space. I looked outside again, and inspected the bars themselves in case somepony had managed to stash something in a groove. Finally, I gathered my courage and turned my PipBuck's beam back to the cage to my right.

My stomach turned immediately, but I swallowed hard to quell the bile and forced myself to look. She seemed big for a mare, but lanky, or more likely just starved. Her mane was cut short, revealing welts and bite marks along her neck. The light and the dirt washed her colours out, but I liked to think she was a deep pink, or maybe even fuschia, with a pale purple mane. Those would look nice together.

She was naked, curled on her side with her legs tucked in close and tight, and her shoulders and back seemed tense, whether from her last moments or just rigor mortis. I couldn't see her face because she was turned away from me, but I got the impression that she was fairly young. Definitely several years younger than myself. Finally, I lowered my gaze to an area I'd tried to ignore, both for her sake and mine. Her flank and lower legs were covered in dozens of small wounds, and what patches of coat she still had there were crusted with dried blood. Her tail was clamped down between her legs and against her barrel, leaving her at least some small dignity in death. I shuddered, again for both of us.

I tilted my PipBuck, and the light glinted off something in her mane. A hairpin of some kind. Exactly what I needed. Damnit.

On second thought, I didn't know the first thing about picking locks. Could I really justify stealing from a dead pony when in reality it wouldn't make my escape any easier? Was a flimsy bobby pin worth dragging my magic over a corpse? I cursed under my breath, and for a moment almost wished I'd been born an earth pony. Then there wouldn't be any decision to make. I would just… sit here.

I mustered my courage, reached out, and tugged on the rounded side of the clip, trying my best not to disturb the dull locks it clung to. The mare's head seemed to turn, and I froze, my heart leaping into my throat. Could she be alive, still, despite her stench and her wounds? But it was just her mane falling across her face, shifting her head off balance by inches. The clip floated toward me, trembling in my magic. I nearly dropped it more than once, and after it passed through the bars into my cage I let it fall to the floor, not in any way prepared to touch it with my hooves or mouth.

Once I'd caught my breath and composed myself, I lifted the pin again and carefully floated it through the bars of my door, rotated it, and slid it into the keyhole. I'd seen ponies mess with locks in Stable Two. It was an unfortunately common hobby for older foals, though luckily most of the Stable's real security was handled electronically. All I needed to do was… jiggle it a little? No? I felt it bend and twist, and quickly pulled it back out.

I stared at the fragile little pin, frowned, and gently straightened it out. Second time's the charm?

In the middle of what must have been my two hundredth attempt on the lock, I heard movement above me. Hoofsteps.

I froze, ears pricked, and tried to keep my breathing steady and silent. I'd been alone in the cage for hours, and the sudden awareness of the world beyond that dark pit was alarming. I didn't dare hope that they'd stay upstairs. Seconds later, the door to the basement opened, letting light spill through. I hurried toward the back of the cage, slipped the bobby pin into my one of my Stable barding's shallow pockets, and switched off my PipBuck's light. I held my breath as a pony descended the stairs, casting fuzzy shadows on the opposite wall.

Seconds hung in the air, and I glanced around in a half-daze, looking for anything else I might have touched that indicated I was looking for a way out. The corpse in the next cell had barely shifted. I hadn't gone near my bucket. Dim white stripes to my left caught my eye, the magic paint I'd used to restore Brisket's tally. Was that incriminating in some way? I could dispel it, although that would produce a flash. Or I could just repaint it the same colour as the wall.

The same colour of the wall. The words hit my brain on an angle. I looked down at myself, then the concrete wall behind me. A thought was forming, slowly bubbling to the surface. It was the same feeling that earned me my place as the Stable's premiere artist, the same as the day I got my cutie mark. It was only inches away… but I was out of time. The hoofsteps rounded the corner, and I barely covered up the scratches before the figure stepped into the room. All I could see was the silhouette of a stallion. Always stallions. It occured that I hadn't seen a single mare on the surface so far. Maybe I was the only one. The thought wasn't exactly comforting.

He approached the cage and stared at me. I started to stare back before catching myself and looking away. The last thing I wanted was to provoke him.

“Enjoy your first night?” he asked, a mocking edge to his voice. He pressed a hoof to the door and rattled it, as if to remind me that I was trapped inside. As if I could have forgotten.

His words actually cleared some of my nerves in the face of sheer confusion. “First night? It hasn't…” PipBucks didn't lose time—it was literally magic—and mine assured me I'd been in the cage for five hours. Did the day pass differently up here, without the princesses? I had to assume they were gone, otherwise ponies like him wouldn't rule towns. “How long…”

“Oh, hours and hours. If your friends didn't think you were dead before, they do now.”

Or maybe he was just trying to scare me. I shivered. “What friends?”

He slammed himself against the bars with a snarl. I flinched. He bared his teeth, and I wondered if I was about to die. “The other one, the bitch with the same suit! You Stable fuckers think you can just stroll into town and kill us? Think you're better cause you squatted in a bunker while everything went to shit?” He punched the door again, and looked at the lock. Here it comes, I thought. He was going to unlock the door and kill me. Maybe, if I was lucky, it would be quick.

He took a deep breath and stepped back. “But I'm not supposed to hurt you. Boss gets first dibs, always, and your friend killed his mare. He's got big plans for you, soon as he's back. And if you're still alive once he's done, I'll make sure to be next in line.”

I managed to speak through the desert in my mouth. “Is that i-it?”

He stuttered over something, then grumbled. “Here.” He reached a hoof into a pocket of his barding and tossed something at me. It splattered against the bars, a few droplets landing on my lips. Apple. Withered, browning apple. It was all over the cage, and the floor, in a sticky mash that was pathetically appealing to my empty stomach and burning throat. He snickered. “No point beating and fucking a mare if she's too passed out to enjoy it.” He kicked a dollop of apple toward me, then turned and left the basement, closing the door behind him and plunging the room back into blackness.

His parting words chilled my heart and squeezed my lungs, but I lowered my muzzle to the floor and started licking up the apple anyway. It was bitter and sour at the same time, and tiny grains of dirt, dust, and soil came up with it. It didn't really sate me. I swallowed down every bit of it I could reach.

Soon enough I was back in the corner, the taste of apple fading from my mouth, and my mind started to work again.

“Same colour as the walls,” I muttered to myself.

Maybe I didn't need to learn how to pick locks overnight.

The next time the basement door opened, I was ready. Eager, even. At the first sign of hoofsteps I crouched next to the bars, got myself in a sturdy, comfortable spot, and cast the spell. Look at the wall, copy the wall, be the wall. I held my breath, and from almost every angle, I was invisible. Probably. I didn't have a mirror on hoof, but there was no reason to think the spell wouldn't work on a living pony.

My visitor descended the steps, moving quickly and nearly silently. I fought to keep my head and ears still. There was a soft clack of hooves on stone, and I stopped breathing. This was pretty much as far as I'd planned.

Perfect silence reigned for a long moment, marred only by the rhythm of my heart and the occasionally creak of my neck vertebrae. I started to worry I'd imagined the hoofsteps, that I had my back turned to an empty room. Finally, the silence was cut, not by a shout, not by angry stomping or violent threats. All I heard was a quiet, “Shit.” A mare's voice—no, a filly's, soft and nervous.

She crept toward the center of the room, stopped, and then started my way. I tensed, but soon enough it became apparent that something else had caught her eye. At the very corner of my vision, a shape approached the cell beside mine. The door clattered and held firm. Something rattled, metal slid against metal, and I watched as the door swung open. That mare was holding a key.

She entered the cell, and I watched in shades of black as she neared the lump of meat that used to be a pony and gave it a poke. She nodded, gave the corpse a few more prods, then turned. Our eyes met.

She jerked back, mouth open, and let out a strangled squeak. Her rump hit the bars behind her.

I didn't move. If I moved my disguise would fall apart. That she'd already seen me didn't matter. That she was clearly not one of my captors didn't matter. That she had a key and was apparently looking for somepony down here also didn't matter. I was a wall.

She looked me up and down, her eyes narrowed through the dark. I hadn't bothered casting the spell on my front, and so the deep blue of my Stable barding must have outlined me against the pitch backdrop. Her gaze landed on my PipBuck.

She approached the bars that separated the two cages. “You want out?” she whispered.

I tried to be a wall, but my stomach churned, and the words bubbled up. “P-please.” That finally broke my paralysis. I shivered. “Who are you?” I asked, my voice nearly cracking.

The mare shot a look to the ceiling, her ears pricked. She slinked her way to the front of my cage and fiddled with the lock. “An idiot,” she muttered. The door clicked, and she swung it open. “Come on, they won't be gone for long.”

That heated my blood a bit. I staggered forward, my stiff, cold muscles burning exquisitely. “Plan?” I said.

She shook her head. “Running, mostly.” She swallowed, and peered at me again. “Can you run?”

I nodded. Pain still stabbed my chest with every movement, and every breath seared my nose, serious injuries from a beating only hours old, but I knew that I could run. If it meant escape from these ponies, I would run across clouds.

We crossed the room, her in the lead, and me stumbling behind. Feeble light trickled down the stairs, casting a bright halo around my rescuer as we crept upward. Every step seemed to squeak louder than the one before. The mare kept glancing back at me over her shoulder, probably glaring.

She peeked her head upstairs, looked around, then stepped into the light. I followed, squinting against the glare.

The stairs emerged in a hallway, and to my left the mare was already trotting forward, headed for the door at its end. Cool light shone from its edges. I took a step after her, then glanced over my shoulder and froze. The other end of the hallway opened up into a room. Sheets of rich, clean paper covered the floor, and drawings were pinned against the wall. I felt a dull note of panic, and my hooves moved on their own.

The torn husk of my sketchbook lay open in one corner, every page ripped out and scattered. Splintered bits of wood were littered about, snapped graphite shafts and the dust of crushed watercolour cakes tossed together in careless piles. The wall of thick, angry scrawls towered over the mess like a headstone, pages nailed up and overlapping one another, forming a macabre mural. The more analytical part of my mind noted that the proportions were surprisingly accurate despite the artless line work. It didn't even take a second for me to recognize the mare depicted. Rendered in stark black and white was a young mare, clad in a tight-fitting suit, with a bulky device attached to her ankle. Across the multiple images, her mane and face were consistent and clear. Littlepip, suffering all manner of tortures. Rape and disfigurement seemed to be a favourite, although more subtle scenes of grief and misery poked through here and there, like one of the young mare craddling the broken body of a foal, her face filthy with blood and tears.

My gaze slipped down the wall at a glacial speed until finally it rested on the floor, and I numbly catalogued each ruined piece of my art supplies.

“Where the fuck are you? We need to… Oh.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw my rescuer staring at me, and past me, to the wall, and at my cutie mark, and at the mess at my hooves. She licked her lips. “We don't have time to—for—fuck. Come on,” she said, and tossed her head toward the exit. “Some of them are probably on the way already.”

And before I knew it, we were running, down the hall and out the door, away from the cages and the monsters.

But those vile, hateful drawings stayed with me.

We turned out the door and darted along the side of the building, toward a street. From the far side of the house came the sound of swearing, yelling, and occasional gunfire, and I was glad to see that were heading directly away from it. At the end of the alley, the mare drew up short, hugged one corner of a house, and peered both ways. I crawled up behind her, trying to see as well, but I could only make out the far side of the street.

She made a quiet, “Ahem,” and kicked lightly at my chest with a rear hoof, and I realized I was perilously close to her rump, my head almost directly overtop of her cutie mark. Berries and mushrooms. I cantered back and stuttered an apology.

Then we were off again, sprinting across the street. I tried to focus on my guide, but I couldn't help glancing across the rows of lurking buildings that lined both sides of the road, stretching off out of sight in either direction. Any of them could hide cages, corpses, or worse. Maybe all of them did.

Behind us and to the left, there was a shout. “The Stable mare! How the fuck—” I glanced backward to see a white, maneless stallion, the leader of the band who'd caught me the day before. Just as I rounded the building, two other ponies sprinted up to join him.

“Faster,” the mare said. She pulled ahead, and I nearly lost sight of her.

Bullets plinked against the building beside me, some inches away from scoring my back and barrel. My heart leapt and my legs jumped into action.

The road, houses, and sky vanished and became one large grey tube for me to sprint through, and barely enough was left of my consciousness to guide my hooves over the split and rubble-strewn ground. The hovering blue shape of my rescuer was another constant, always fixed at the center of my vision.

More bullets flew down the street toward us. My guide ducked her head and tucked her tail, but she didn't stop running for a second. I tried to do the same, but almost immediately planted a hoof on the tip of my tail and staggered wildly, barely catching myself against the curb to one side of the road. The mare didn't notice my slip-up and once again I was left playing catch up.

She veered to the right and disappeared into the wall of twisted grey. I steered in kind and shook myself awake in time to see the narrow alley she'd chosen. With yet more gunshots licking at my heels, I scampered into the opening and hit empty air.

I was in mid-fall, my legs pinwheeling and a scream at the base of my throat, when the mare called out, “Drop!”

Great timing.

My left foreleg touched down first, followed by my other three a millisecond later. There was an audible clack, and a sharp pain shot up my leading leg from hoof to shoulder, then settling in the knee.

“Don't stop!” came the shout from far, far ahead down the alley.

I gritted my teeth and did as she said. Every fourth step tore the breath from my lungs and sent my eyes rolling in my head. “Leg… can't—” I choked on my own saliva. “Hold on.” I didn't stop though. She was too far ahead to hear anyway. My legs kept moving, and I chastised myself for wasting a breath.

Nearby chunks of wall exploded in little bursts, and I heard two heavy impacts behind us, one after the other. They were in the alley, not a dozen yards behind me. My eyes closed and my chest expanded, and I found I was eager to have it over with. But I also increased my strides, swung my legs a touch faster.

Something stretched out and grabbed my neck, and I was swept off my hooves and tossed against the alley wall in a heap. Forelegs wrapped around my torso and held me still as bullets ripped through the air above us. As soon as I hit the ground, the mare pulled me back upright and toward a small window at our head height. Shards of glass tore at my coat, but I couldn't tell if any broke the skin.

I crashed through a wooden table, but managed to keep my hooves under me. We were in a dark, dusty basement, and the space was filled with broken and jumbled furniture. My guide was already darting through the debris with practiced ease. I caught up quickly, boards snapping and nails ripping free beneath me with each step. “Where are we going?” I hissed, and glanced back at the window and the empty alleyway beyond.

“Out of town.” She ran up a flight of stairs and glanced both ways at the top. “And then further out of town. They really want you.” She turned left and out of sight.

I followed at a slower pace. I couldn't tell if they were even chasing us anymore, which raised the dire question of what they were doing. “How far will they follow us?”

There was no reply.

I peered around the corner and directly down the barrel of a gun.

“Not much longer,” said the white pony with no mane. “Bitch, these are our streets. I know every nook and cranny.” A rictus smile split his face, and his gaze shifted past me and down the stairs. “Where's your new friend? You Stable ponies like to stick together, dontcha?”

I fell to my rump and shook my head. “I don't… She was right—”

A loud clang rang out.

The stallion crumpled to one side. His gun clattered away, and his hooves flew up to protect his skull. The blue mare stood over him, the base of an old lamp clutched between her teeth. She swung it down again, and again, slow and methodical. He tried to crawl away, and she followed him step by step, until his back hit the wall. She swung the lamp and connected, and this time it produced a wet, squishy sound, like someone whipping apple sauce. He didn't move as she applied the last few strokes.

She dropped the cracked lamp to the floor and, with only a moment's hesitation, retrieved his pistol and slipped it into a saddlebag. Her legs were trembling. “F-fuck, we're gonna die,” she muttered.

“You… you got him,” I pointed out, helpfully, and tried not to look at the corpse.

“The other two are somewhere, I don't know.” She shook her head. “This was really stupid.”

Something occurred to me, and for a moment I wondered if I didn't deserve to be shot at. I focused my vision and checked the PipBuck's E.F.S. spell.

“They're… that way.” I pointed toward the south-west corner of the building, toward the end of the alley where we'd lost them. “Circling to our right.”

She followed my gesture. Her eyes landed on my PipBuck for a moment, and her nose wrinkled. “Didn't think to say something earlier?”

I let out a dry cough. “Forgot.” I was an idiot. At least she seemed to have calmed down a bit.

We retraced our steps through the basement, and this time I kept a close eye on my E.F.S. the whole time. As the blips circled all the way to the opposite side of the building, we slipped through the window and darted down the alley, and just as carefully through the south of Ponyville. I recognized a few of the landmarks as we passed, but I wasn't in as much of a sightseeing mood as my first time through.

In the middle of a street choked with garbage, the mare stopped me with a soft shoulder check, then pointed to one pile of refuse in particular. “Is that yours?” she asked.

I blinked, startled, and padded forward cautiously. A tattered notebook was perched between the street and the curb, and a few pencils were scattered nearby.

“Well?”

“Oh, um, yes. They were mine. Must have dropped it when they tied me up.” I cleared my throat. “Sorry.”

She gave me a funny look. “What do you mean, 'were yours?' I saw you looking at all the paper and stuff they wrecked back at the furniture store, like you were about to cry.” She reached out, grabbed the notebook in a fetlock, and held it out to me. She noticed my hesitation, remarked, “I'm not going to carry it for you, horn-head,” and tossed it into the air.

Without thinking, I caught it with my magic and held it aloft a good distance away from me. All I could see was that grotesque wall of illustrations, and I restrained the urge to toss the sketchbook away.

She squinted at me a moment more, and then we were moving again, both of us presumably eager to put Ponyville far behind us.

Minutes into our silent trot, on impulse, I asked, “What's your name?”

She looked all around, as if somepony might be listening in. “Iris.”

“Iris. Thanks for saving me.”

“Mhm.” She raised an eyebrow expectantly.

It took me a second. “Oh. Palette.”

She glanced at my cutie mark, and she smirked.

“Of course.”

Iris' hideout turned out to be a long forgotten root cellar on Sweet Apple Acres, buried between two stretches of barren apple trees. It was the nicest interior I'd seen since leaving the Stable, which still wasn't saying much. A few shelves lined the room, coated in dust and some meager piles of berries and mushrooms, along with some other plants I didn't recognize. On the floor, ancient bottles were tucked against the wall, neatly arranged one by one, waiting for the next harvest season. A single lightbulb dangled from the ceiling, and its light barely reached the walls to either side.

“Sit down,” Iris said, shoving me toward a corner.

I sat.

She sculked off into the unlit depths of the cellar, then returned moments later with a wad of herbs.

“Chew on these.” She thrust a strip of dried bark out to me. I took it cautiously into my mouth and gave it a nibble. It was gritty and earthy, and everything I would expect tree bark to taste like. Funny. I'd never sniffed, licked, or even been near tree bark before, but somehow I knew what it would taste like.

She swiped something from a nearby shelf and popped it into her mouth. “Lay down,” she ordered, “and tilt your head back.” She leaned over me, both our jaws working on our respective herbs. She cracked her lips open, letting foul liquid mixed with saliva dribble down onto my face. I started to jerk upright. “Hold still,” she growled through clenched teeth, sending droplets flicking across the room.

I winced at the immediate pain in my ribs from the sudden movement and settled back down. My eyes were squeezed shut now, and I could almost ignore the smell as the foamy fluid worked its way across my muzzle and into my nostrils.

“Slow breaths. Don't suck it in, but don't snort it out. Use your mouth to breath if you can.” She straightened and spat a wad of leafy mash against the wall. “Should help a bit.”

I maneuvered the bark to one side of my mouth and said, “No healing potions?”

Iris snorted. “I've got one, and it's for lethal wounds only. And it's mine.” Under her breath, she grumbled, “Should've charged you for the balmleaf too.” And she trudged off out of the light again, leaving me with my soggy strip of bark and a nose that was slowly starting to feel more normal.

I shifted, and I felt a lump under me, a bit of uneven elevation. Then I felt another lump, this one in my throat. I levitated the sketchbook out from under me and into the air. In the feeble light, in this latest underground cellar, I tried to open it.

Drool mixed with pulpy juice trickled down my throat.

The sketchbook fell back to the ground, and a few minutes later I spat out the remains of the bark. Maybe it was just in my head, but the pain in my ribs started to ease.

“Thanks, Iris,” I whispered.

I curled up in my corner, my movements slow and careful in deference to the numerous aches and pains that harassed me all over. My eyes closed.

Tiny grains of dirt and sawdust coated the floor and floated through the air, leaving every surface slightly gritty and unclean, and the floor was cold, just like the raiders' basement. But here the smell of rotting wood and musky underground air was fainter, and alongside it was the faint aroma of apple. It reminded me of the orchard in Stable Two. My muscles loosened, and my cheek touched the ground, and my insides grew a bit warmer.

I was half-asleep when the gentle weight of a blanket was tossed across my back. A small smile crossed my face.

Through dim images of home, I mumbled, “Thanks, Iris.”

The cellar was nice. I coveted every moment Iris let me spend there, which was thankfully most of them. With her permission, I settled a little corner all my own, with threadbare blankets and cushions, and some stacked crates that gave a slight illusion of privacy and the same kind of reassuring closeness my room in Stable Two had always provided. Whenever I was dragged from my little corner, it was all I thought about.

My nose felt better after the second day, and my ribs by the fourth. Both injuries were still tender to the touch, but they mostly faded into the background with the other aches and pains. Mattresses were apparently too much to ask for in the Wasteland, so the only thing between me and the cold ground was a thin, ragged blanket, and my back grew tighter every morning. I knew better than to complain. Iris slept with nothing, just her ragged clothing and her natural coat. Some nights she muttered and shot glares my way. She always fell silent and rolled over when she caught me looking, so I stopped looking, and let her irritation wash over me. Before long, I started to find it comforting, a reminder that I wasn't completely alone down here.

In Stable Two, boredom had always nipped at my ankles, driving me to paint, or read, or play. Even in my early thirties, I struggled to sit still for long. That was normal in Stable Two. Monotony and apathy were facts of life, common as a cough, and ponies spent time and energy fighting them off.

Now I savoured the boredom. I huddled in every quiet second, drawing the stillnes about me like a cloak. Not sulking, just savouring. If I was forced into action, even something as simple and essential as eating, it was something to be endured, to be dealt with as quickly as possible so I could get back to doing nothing again. From the outside, I probably seemed traumatized. Maybe I was.

The first morning, Iris insisted I follow her outside. Nopony shot at us, nothing came hurtling down the hill, snarling and screaming for blood. We picked berries and nuts and collected flowers and leaves. Iris pointed out which swaths of forest were safest and most plentiful, and which to avoid. Hours later, we trudged back to the cellar and settled down for our only meal of the day. Once the cellar door was closed, my muscles finally unclenched, and I retreated back to my private corner.

She dragged me out the next morning, earlier this time, barely after dawn. The light was dim, and I had to switch my PipBuck's light on to tell one plant from another. We returned with less than half of the previous day's pickings, and we both went to bed hungry. The morning after that, we left even earlier, so early that our first steps above were into smokey darkness. I was terrified at first, and waved my PipBuck's lamp in a wild attempt to orient myself, but Iris led us forward as if she knew the steps by heart. As we settled into the rhythm of searching and gathering, my nerves passed, and I found something soothing in blindness. I dimmed my lamp until it barely glowed.

Halfway through, Iris pulled me aside, onto a ridge we'd always avoided because it was too open, too visible. We sat and overlooked the town. Dawn broke over the horizon, the sun bled its way through the coarse skyline, and my heart sank as it revealed the jagged shapes of Ponyville.

Iris saw me shrink back, and sighed.

She let me stay inside after that, and I was grateful.

The cellar was nice.

Iris kept to herself. She startled at sudden movements, noises, and sharp breaths, and she looked at everything with suspicion, even the walls of the cellar, as if they might collapse one night just to spite us. But despite everything, she never aimed that suspicion my way. She'd seen me in a cage, pretending to be a wall, and she'd heard me whimper during my first night in the cellar. I was probably too pathetic to fear.

Her area of the cellar was as impersonal as she was. Only a bare surface the size of a sleeping pony marked it as being any different from the shelves and crates that filled the rest of the room. She had no personal effects as far as I could tell, other than whatever was inside the saddlebags that never left her sight. But it was still her corner, so I kept my hooves to myself, and she provided me the same curtesy.

One morning stretched on longer than the others, long enough that the pangs in my stomach grew sharper than normal. Absently, I glanced upward, to the trap door. Not a trickle of light slipped through the cracks. Eight o'clock, according to my PipBuck. An hour after dusk. Iris had never been gone for so long before. Minute by minute, more of my attention shifted to the door. Thirty minutes went by, and I found myself staring blankly, unthinking, my body paralyzed but my heart racing. What could I do? Go after her?

I'm ashamed to say that in the end I did nothing. I fell asleep, and when I woke up in the early shades of morning, she was back, passed out atop the plank that served as her bed, curled up tight and facing away from me. After nearly a week outside, I still didn't know much. I couldn't find food on my own, couldn't cook it. I couldn't avoid raiders or kill them with blunt instruments, or treat a wound. But there was something sad about Iris' posture, like she'd cried herself to sleep. Maybe I was just looking for a way to help her and seeing pain where there was none. I slipped out of my corner and crept toward her.

Her tail was tucked in tight, and her mane was swept over her face like a veil, obscuring her features. That was how she always slept; without blankets, her own body was all the warmth she could find. Her chest rose and fell rhythmically and smoothly. I couldn't see any new marks across her back or sides. I stretched my neck over her sleeping form to peer at her legs, and saw a wrinkled, folded, and stained sheet of white paper between her hooves, clutched against her chest like a child's toy.

I recoiled before I even recognized it. Something inside me, residual and bestial, hated that paper. My hoof struck the edge of a shelf, and the rich knock echoed through the cellar. Before the sound could leave the air, I was back in my corner and under the blanket.

Out of my sight, hidden behind a stack of crates, Iris shifted. Paper crinkled and rustled, and I heard a soft, breathy sigh.

Dawn broke, and Iris left. The paper sat in her place, face down on the bed. Its presence reminded me of another stack of papers, the sketchbook that I'd stashed under a shelf by the door, completely out of sight and almost out of reach. Suddenly, I couldn't forget it was there, as if its location was marked on my E.F.S.. I couldn't even remember what I'd drawn in that sketchbook, if I'd used it at all while in Ponyville. Not that it mattered. I'd only see images of a brutalized Littlepip, if not worse. I should have asked Iris to burn it for me. I should have left it in the street. But Iris had asked me to take it. It was one of the only things she'd ever asked me to do.

Iris returned around noon. She had found apples, seemingly pristine ones. They were smaller than the ones down in Stable Two, and unripe. I hopped over to our makeshift table with considerable cheer. An underdeveloped apple was a feast for us.

I was savouring a bite of my meal, eyes closed in rapture, when Iris sat down. There was a telltale rustle of paper on wood. I kept my eyes closed for a moment longer.

“Palette,” Iris said. It was the first time she'd said my name since learning it. “This is yours, right?”

“Yes.” I swallowed a mouthful of apple. “What is it?” I asked, and immediately wished I hadn't.

She let out an airy laugh. “A drawing.”

“Oh.” I hoped she'd leave it at that. But she didn't.

“It looks like a town, but not Ponyville.” She slid the paper toward me. I braced myself and looked. It was the sketch from atop the building, right before the raiders had captured me. My heart fluttered, and not in a good way, but I didn't cringe or gag.

“It's Ponyville,” I said. “I… um, took some artistic liberties.”

“Artistic liberties,” she repeated, rolling the words around in her mouth. I was struck by how young she sounded all of a sudden, just like she had in the raiders' basement. “It's scarier than Ponyville. Like the buildings could cut me.”

I shivered and looked away. I could picture those sharp corners. I'd felt some of them during our escape. “They can cut. Or stab. Splinters.”

She laughed again. Her apple sat untouched on the table, all of her attention focused on my creation. It was like a weight or a shade had been lifted from her, and she all but glowed. “Are there more of these in that little book I found?”

“Maybe.”

“Can I… do you mind if I look?”

How could I deny her that? I nodded, and brought the last of the apple to my mouth so I wouldn't have to speak.

The sound of pages turning filled the cellar that night, and every so often they were followed by a foalish gasp. I must have filled out that book before I left Stable Two, which was reassuring. She was enjoying the artwork of others, mostly pre-war artists, albeit copied by my horn. After two hours, she was still at it. Even I hadn't paid that much attention to my art history. If she'd been born in a Stable, maybe—

I focused on my PipBuck's clock and watched the minutes blend into hours. On a whim, I checked my condition. All green, except I was malnourished. No surprises there. I'd been losing weight every day since I'd stepped above ground, and my stomach was always empty. I switched tabs idly, and landed on the radio tuner. I blinked, squinted, and gave the device a solid cuff with my other hoof. There were two radio channels, and neither was from Stable Two. It baffled me that somewhere, in all the waste and desolation, there was a pony sitting in front of a microphone, and a radio tower to match. But there they were. I switched to the first one.

Static sputtered forth for a moment as the radio tuned itself, then, with a quiet click, a pure mare's voice spilled into the room. She was unaccompanied, just the sweet tones of her vocals against the faint analog whine. I flinched at the sudden burst of noise; I'd somehow expected it to play discretely into my ear, which demonstrated how much I knew about PipBucks, despite having worn one most of my life.

My hoof moved for the control panel, to shut the radio off before I disturbed my host, but a subtle lilt in the song gave me pause. I knew that voice, not in passing, but almost intimately.

“You've got a radio on that thing?” Iris said. I hadn't noticed her approach. We were nose to nose, her forelegs perched on the edge of my bed surface. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“Forgot.” At this point, I was surprised she hadn't ripped the device from my ankle to see what other life changing conveniences I'd forgotten. “Want me to turn it—”

“Up! Turn it up!” She settled back onto her haunches with closed eyes.

I was happy to. The volume knob was cranked to its max, and together we enjoyed the flawless voice of Velvet Remedy.

Velvet Remedy. Vanished nearly a month ago, presumed dead by everyone in Stable Two, now serenading the wasteland with just as much, if not more, passion and soul as I remembered. Maybe we were just listening to a recording. Maybe she'd somehow gotten in front of a microphone before being torn apart by feral ponies, and the voice coming from my radio was a snapshot of a hope about to die.

Iris shuffled closer, dodging past the makeshift walls of my corner to bring herself closer to the music. I shifted back to give her room.

We were both asleep by the end of the song, so I couldn't tell you what came on the air next. But for the first time since I'd arrived, Iris slept under a blanket, and I slept with a smile on my face.

The radio was still playing when I woke, although the song that played was indistinguishable through the haze of sleep. I reached for the PipBuck with my other leg, missed, and instead sank down into the blanket, nuzzling toward warmth. It felt like I had a lot more to nuzzle than normal. A minute or two later, my blanket shifted, and I felt something firm against my side.

With a slight groan, I raised my head and squinted down to see Iris. She was stiff as a board, head turned resolutely away from me. Her chest rose and fell in a passable imitation of sleep. One limb at a time, I carefully shifted backward toward the wall until we weren't touching, and then further. A part of me snarled at the disappearing warmth against my chest, but the surprise of finding another mare in my bed had woken my brain up in an instant. I spun my PipBuck's volume dial to fade the song out. The knob clicked as it reached its limit, and the cellar was plunged into early morning silence.

“Iris.”

The silence stretched on for another long minute.

“Yeah?” she said, finally, like a nervous filly.

“We can get up now, if you want.” I rolled to my feet and brushed the blanket aside, stretched my spine and shoulders. “Isn't it time to head out?”

She looked toward the cold light trickling past the trap door. “Past time,” she grumbled, and slipped to the floor. Seconds later, she had her saddlebags at her sides and was climbing the stairs.

“Wait!” I stepped forward and blinked the last of the sleep from my eyes. “I'll come.”

Iris looked me over, head to hoof, and frowned. “You sure? Finding food hasn't gotten any easier. And Ponyville's still there.”

I huffed. “Eating half a meal every day is doing wonders for my barrel, but I'm running out of flank. No offense, but not everypony can pull off the starving model look.”

Doubt flickered across her face, and I saw her eyes twitch down toward her chest for a split second. Then she huffed right back, turned, and left the cellar.

I followed.

Iris marched directly for the forest overlooking the town. Over her shoulder, she called, “Start over by the farmhouse! There're some wild blackberries that I haven't checked in a while.”

“We're splitting up?”

Without turning, she replied, “Don't need a big flank to be a big filly. Take care of yourself for a minute or two.” At a volume I probably wasn't supposed to overhear, she added, “… do you some good.”

That stung a little, but I didn't rise to the bait. After all, I deserved every word of it. So, with my head held high, I trotted away from the cellar for the first time in days, headed for the icon on my PipBuck labelled “Sweet Apple Acres — Farmhouse.”

I made my way through the rows of dead trees with one eye on my E.F.S. radar and the other scanning every direction for signs of trouble. All too soon, the forest stopped at a stark treeline, and between me and the house was an empty, open field. I discarded all pretense of stealth in favour of speed, and darted through the tall grass with my belly low to the ground and my head tucked under my shoulders.

My lungs burned by the time I reached the far side. I found shelter behind a derelict fence and sank to my haunches, gasping and shaking. I'd felt so light and serene when I woke up, but now I remembered why I liked my corner. There were no vanishing points, no staggering distances or impossible heights, and the chances of being attacked by a rapist were significantly lower.

I took a breath, stood up, and… crouched back down. That wasn't going to work. This had been a fantastically bad idea. I contemplated a dash back to the cellar door, but Iris would look for me, and she'd worry. I took a few more breaths, deep and slow, and found a familiar rhythm. Velvet's tune. That was it. I groped around my PipBuck's casing until I found the extendable earbloom, brought it to my ear, and tuned to the radio station I'd found the night before.

By chance, it was once again Velvet's voice that greeted me, and I wondered if it was the only thing the station ever played. I stayed in the bush for a few seconds, letting the music wash over me and lift my mind away from the horrors that lurked just down the hill, and then I stepped out and circled the farmhouse. It wasn't perfect: my heart still leapt every time something moved in my peripheral vision, and I refused to imagine what could sneak up on me now that one of my ears was completely occupied. My head nodded along to the beat, and I walked in time with the chorus.

The blackberries were easy to spot and, thanks to telekinesis, easy to harvest. I looked for the ones that squished a bit under my magic—all green, despite the name, but Iris had explained at one point that squishy blackberries were edible—and stacked them gently in one of my barding's pockets. The song ended, and for a long moment, silence blasted into my ear, and the world surged into detail. The wind tickled at my coat and sent shivers down my spine, and the sky above opened like a hungry maw.

I fumbled for my PipBuck in a panic. There were two other radio frequences listed, and I switched to one of them between heartbeats.

A mare's voice spoke with careful enunciation. I recognized both the speaker and the words, and my panic was swept away in a tide of confusion.

“—will be closed for maintenance until further notice.”

The voice that had narrated Stable life for the last twelve years.

“And finally, a reminder that, due to the recent exodus of Stable citizens, security patrols and protocols will be increased for the foreseeable future. Please cooperate with the security team to minimize any delays or inconveniences.”

The voice that had no doubt condemned me and everything I'd ever done mere days ago.

“The safety of Stable Two is our utmost concern, and to that end, armed security officers will be stationed outside the newly discovered Stable exit. Maintenance technicians working in the area are encouraged to consult with the stationed officers if they feel unsafe at any time.”

The Overmare's voice, tinny and laden with static, radiated out into the vast open world above. I wondered if anypony had ever noticed the strange broadcast, and wondered about the tiny steel village beneath their hooves.

“The main hall between residence wings C and D will be closed for maintenance…”

I looked down at the dirt and wondered what part of Stable Two I was standing on.

The message was prerecorded, of course, and looped every minute or so. I listened to it for a while, not sure if I was happy to hear another familiar voice or terrified at the reminder of just how far away I was from it, and finally switched it off. I gathered the last few berries within sight and hurried back toward the cellar.

Iris was nowhere to be seen.

I stood on the door and glanced around. I opened my mouth, and something hissed at me from a nearby shrub.

“Get down!”

I complied without hesitation, already tense and ready to be perforated, and dove into cover beside Iris. “What?” I whispered.

She jerked her chin toward the farmhouse. “Those three were tailing you. Don't see any guns.”

“That's a good sign, right?” I leaned forward and peered. I could barely make out three silhouettes in the distance.

“Maybe. Or they could be alicorns.”

“Alicorns? Like the princesses?”

“Princesses? Fuck, no. Just shut up.” She jabbed me with an elbow. “How did they sneak up on you? They were making enough noise to wake up all of Ponyville.”

I bashfully tugged the earbloom from my ear and clipped it back into my PipBuck.

The three figures approached. Within seconds, it became clear that they were all pony-sized and quadrupedal. Another minute, and we could tell that two were unicorns and the third was an earth pony. They entered the woods, now less than one hundred feet away, and I spotted the long, narrow shapes along the sides of the two unicorns. “Guns,” I hissed.

Iris gasped softly, and the branches around us rustled. I looked over to watch her slide out of the shrub, stand, and creep forward. Her body was tight, but her tail flicked nervously behind her.

Was she seriously going to fight them? She still had the pistol from the raider she'd killed, but there were three of them, and their guns were twice the size of hers. Did size matter when it came to guns? I wanted to step out beside her and help for once, but my limbs refused, my breath hitched, and the world swam. Tears born of frustration and self-disgust started to well up in my eyes. I curled up tighter and prayed that I wasn't about to watch my only friend be killed.

The strangers entered the first row of trees and spread out, leaving a few trunks between them. Flashes of a purple tail were all I could see of Iris as she stalked through the underbrush. Soon she was between two of the ponies, and only feet away from the larger unicorn. A red stallion, he stood head and shoulders above Iris, and the heavy revolvers on his sides looked as unfriendly as guns could come.

There was an explosion of noise and movement as Iris shot upright and launched herself at the stallion. A shrill, exciting shout of, “Rust!” escaped her as they collided. He yelped, and his guns glowed for a split second with magenta-tinted magic. His two companions spun to attention, and the other unicorn levitated the long rifle from her flank.

“Iris?” the red stallion said, surprised and perplexed. And then, “Iris! Guys, it's her! She's okay!”

I watched as the guns were stowed and the three strangers gathered around Iris. They exchanged hugs and incoherent greetings, and happiness rolled off the group in waves.

The mare, a light blue unicorn, said, “We thought you were dead! Or… you know, worse than dead. How did you get away?”

Iris giggled. “The Stable Dweller, actually.”

“The Stable Dweller?” asked the other earth pony. His eyes were wide, and his voice tinged with awe.

“I think so. She had a Stable suit on. You should have seen her, Rust. Killed a dozen raiders all on her own.” Iris paused, then turned to glance back. “Oh, right. Palette! You can come out now. They're friends!”

I flinched at my name, and the bush rustled around me. Every pair of eyes turned to my hiding place, and after a second embarrassment drove me to action. I stumbled forward and approached sheepishly. “Hello,” I said. Maybe I could salvage this first impression.

“Palette, this is Rust, Duster, and Gull. We all lived in Ponyville before that gang showed up. I got separated, they got away, and…” Iris looked up at the group. “What happened to you guys?”

The pale blue mare, Gull, sighed. “It's a long story.” All three of them seemed to deflate a bit.

Iris looked to me, and at the pockets of my barding, filled with blackberries.

“Then how about we sit down and hear it over some grub?”

We had to expand our table from one upturned crate to four in order to seat all of us. I found myself pushed to the far side of the circle, opposite Iris. To my sides, Gull and Duster gave me a wide berth.

“… once we made it out of Ponyville and found each other, we wanted to go back for you, I swear. But we didn't have any weapons or anything, and Duster had that nasty leg wound, so…” Gull looked down at the table.

“Don't worry, I get it,” Iris assured her. “Go on.”

“Right, so, we found each other and figured, we need help. Rust Bucket and I aren't much good unarmed, and Duster needed a doctor or something. We just started moving south. Apparently there's a town just down the railroad tracks, maybe a week away on hoof, called New Appleloosa. Their doctor patched Dusty up for free—she was a real sweetheart—and then Rust and I saved up by working at the bar until we could buy some heat. We didn't eat very much, and we slept outside, but it still took us most of a month to get the money.”

“I kept saying we should just borrow the caps,” Rust added. “Duster didn't—”

Iris tsked. “Of course. I'm glad you didn't.”

“Well, pfft, yeah! You were fine. Fuck, we should have taken even more time.” Rust chuckled.

I caught a flicker of something pass over Iris' face, but it was gone in a moment.

“Once we bought some guns and Duster was all good, we headed out. Heard DJ Pon3 say that Ponyville got cleared out, and something about a pegasus ghoul.” She paused. “But nothing about other captives.”

Duster winced, and Rust said, “We figured you were dead.”

Iris cracked a smile. “But you wanted to come home anyway, huh?”

“We were going to bury you, I think,” Duster said quietly.

“Oh.”

“We checked Ponyville. There were a couple raiders still, but Rust got 'em quick enough. Then we had to sort through all the corpses.” Gull's face twisted in disgust. “None of them were pretty. And none of them were you. We were fixing to give up when I spotted your new Stable friend over by the farm.” She looked around the cellar. “Never would have pictured you in this old hole.”

“I should have remembered,” Duster said. “Fixed up that door myself a couple winters ago.”

“There's still a gang in Ponyville,” Iris said. “At least a dozen raiders that weren't around when the Stable Dweller came through. They nabbed Palette a few days ago, but I got her out before they hurt her much.”

Gull cracked a wide grin at Iris. “So… a Stable pony saves your life, you return the favour? Is that what it takes to get some attention from you these days?”

She smiled and suppressed a giggle, and I couldn't help but smile myself. I could see the affection between these four. It was a little inspiring, but mostly adorable. I suddenly felt like I was intruding on a private moment, so I focused on something that had been nagging at the back of my mind. “You said you were saved by a stable dweller?”

Everyone turned to me. Gull glanced at Iris, then said, “Not a stable dweller. The Stable Dweller. She's made some waves up here. The radio DJ's always talking about her.”

Duster gasped, and a light filled his eyes. “Waves? She's… she's a hero. A real one. She's saved whole towns! I bought a radio for our house in Appleloosa just to find out what she's up to.”

“You believe everything you hear on the radio?” Rust asked wryly. “From the way he talks about her, I bet they're fucking.”

Duster drew a sharp breath, but I cut him off.

“Could you describe her?” I asked.

Iris shuddered and screwed her eyes shut. “She was a little unicorn, around my age, I think. I kept passing out and waking up, so I can't remember what she looked like. But I remember how she made those raiders scream.” Iris looked at the floor. “I think she dragged me out of the library, cause the next thing I remember is waking up outside town under some garbage.”

“That sounds like it could be Littlepip.” I was appalled. “She just left you there?”

“Yeah. I guess she had places to be. But she must have slipped me some healing potion or something, cause I felt a lot better after I woke up. I could walk again, and I s-stopped bleeding pretty quick.”

Gull slid closer and rested her head on Iris' shoulder, and Duster patted her hoof with his own.

“Fuck, I'm sorry I said that… that we should have taken longer,” Rust said, sounding a little choked.

Iris shook her head. “We've all been knocked around a bit. It wasn't that much worse than normal.”

Nopony believed her.

“Come with us,” Rust said. “It's not perfect in Appleloosa, but we've got a little place. There's cheap food, and a store for bandages and blankets and stuff, and an actual doctor! Things are better there.” He snorted. “Definitely better than living next door to a bunch of fucking raiders. Safety in numbers, right?”

Iris looked around the cellar, and I followed her gaze. Other than the hoofmarks in the dust and the stack of crates around my corner, it looked like nopony had been there since before the war. It didn't look like a home.

“Of course I'm coming with you,” Iris said. “Why would I want to stay here?”

Everypony laughed except me. It took them a few seconds to notice.

“You can come too!” Iris assured me, though she didn't sound very certain herself. She looked to the other three. “She can come.”

They exchanged looks. “Yeah, totally. It'll be a bit cramped, but we can make it work,” Rust said.

The black-and-white page that still sat on the table caught my eye, and my stomach churned, and I looked down at my PipBuck, and thought of the voice I'd heard earlier that day. I looked up at the three wasteland survivors around me.

“Thank you, but no. I don't think I belong up there. Not yet, anyway.”

Iris frowned and leaned toward me, breaking contact with her friends. “Are you sure? There's nopony but raiders for miles, and this place isn't as safe as you think.”

“I'm sure.” And another thought occured to me. “Here,” I said, and offered my leg. “Normally these need to be removed by specialists, but I got it tweaked before I left, in case somepony tried to track me down through it.” I groped with a hoof until I found the lip of a small plastic cap, and with a pop, the PipBuck clattered to the table. “I think you'll need it more than me.”

Iris reached out for it cautiously. “Seriously? I don't even know how to use it. And aren't these things insanely valuable? I know I've done a lot for you, but this—”

“It's pretty simple to use. And if you're worried about value…” I pulled a single bobby pin from my pocket. “Can any of you show me how to pick a lock?”

The wind blew around me, seemingly from all sides, tossing my mane from one side of my face to the other, and carried with it a scent of decay, an aroma with which I had recently become all too familiar. The grey sky above stretched off into the distance until it vanished behind hills and trees. The sheer expanse made me feel horribly insignificant.

The door was smaller than I imagined, the same colour as the dirt it was embedded into. No wonder nopony had ever found it. I withdrew a bobby pin and a small screwdriver from my barding's pockets and set them into the lock. I had no way to know this would work, that this kind of security could even be picked with a bobby pin.

Even after Gull's detailed instructions, it took me a few tries, several of which nearly snapped my only bobby pin in half, but in the end the door clicked open. I stepped back inside. The stale, odourless air settled around me in a motherly embrace. My hooves clicked on the ancient, flawless steel floor, and in a clear, confident voice, I called out.

“Is anypony there? It's Palette.”

I moved forward, down the long, twisting stairs that separated the deep haven of Stable Two from the wilds above. The door clicked shut behind me, the lock thankfully intact despite my intervention. The sensation of cool air passing over my bare ankle tickled, and I was more aware of it with each passing step. I hadn't been without a PipBuck for nearly two decades, and having it removed was like having a new leg.

There was a second door at the bottom, this one secured by password. Clearly, I pronounced, letter by letter, “Cee em cee, three, bee eff eff.” The doors slid apart, revealing an unremarkable maintenance hallway. Uniform grey walls on all sides. A purposeful grey, decided upon by designers, engineers, and probably dozens of other important ponies.

“Hello?” I called again. “Anypony around?”

There was a sharp clang from down the hallway. “Uh, what? Who's there?” said a stallion's voice. Hooves cantered closer. A security pony slid to stop in front of me.

“Hello,” I said.

There was a moment of dumbfounded silence. “Palette?”

In the end, it didn't take much explaining. Despite some stern, almost insulting words from the Overmare, the only things anypony seemed interested in was what happened to my PipBuck and how I was able to open the door from outside.

Hours later, I was back in my comfortable, standard-issue quarters. Without a PipBuck, I had no idea what time it was, but the lights were still on in the hallway. I sat on the bed and stared at the wall.

A young, up-and-coming colt had supplanted me as the Stable's primary artist within days of my departure, and several of his murals already dotted major hallways. A few were even painted over my old work. I wished him only the best. My paintings were never particularly good anyway.

Without the constant pressure to beautify more of the Stable, to update old favourites, or to teach art classes, I was bored. Boredom, the most fundamental threat to life underground. Sleep was hours away yet, and until the technicians got a new PipBuck to me, radio wasn't an option. Without really meaning to, I levitated an old paintbrush from the bedside table and twirled in through the air.

Conversations played through my mind. So did sights, sounds, moments of clarity. Even if I wanted to forget my experiences in Ponyville, they seemed to be stamped onto my memory, pressed like vinyl. And when I closed my eyes, I saw the town spread out below me, jagged rooftops and ruined streets. I saw cages filled with broken bodies, and misshapen ponies jeering at a bound mare. I saw Littlepip craddling a dead foal, and Velvet Remedy with a scarlet bullet hole in her head. Each image had the composition of a masterpiece, the detail of a photograph, the colours of a fever dream. Any of them would be the best mural to ever come from my horn.

A shiver rolled through me and settled in the ankle of my right foreleg. I gathered the blankets of my bed and wrapped them around my shoulders. They were full and soft and warm, so unlike the tatters I had in the cellar.

A small fire spread through my stomach like alcohol, and I closed my eyes. The paintbrush stilled in the air, its tip pointed and focused. A small smile crossed my face.

A crowd had gathered around me. Not the usual gaggle of passing ponies who stopped to watch an expert demonstrate her craft. This was a proper crowd—a quarter of the Stable, maybe more. They spoke in hushed whispers. Security ponies were scattered throughout, and watched me work with hard, tense faces. They understood the line I was walking, and were prepared to drag me away the moment I crossed it.

The edges of the mural were dark. In fact, the whole thing started dark. I prepared my canvas with wide strokes of pitch black oil paint from corner to corner. Stable Two's greyness recoiled from its edges. If it was left like that, and allowed to dry, it would be a window into the abyss, an illustration of one of Stable Two's oldest myths about the outside.

Then I added a second, smaller rectangle, with a mix of white and black. Grey, only a few shades off from the surrounding walls. The corners and lines implied a surface along the top of the painting. A ceiling, broken by a single, bright opening.

The murmuring of the crowd grew.

My brush wasn't the wind over a field, a bullet down a street, or a pony through a window. It was the gentle, pale glow of the morning sun, and a toasty blanket, and the anticipation of a meager breakfast. Most of all, it was the return of a friend after a time apart.

In truth, the sun had never spilled across the steps of the cellar in a silver curtain of light, and dust had never floated through the air like specks of gold, and even with the sputtering light bulb on, the shelves and jars and crates were never so clearly illuminated. I had taken some artistic liberties.

The image took shape within minutes. The crowd shrank as obligations called ponies away, and grew as shifts and meals ended. I was never sure who was watching, and for the most part I didn't care. The mural was for me, and perhaps one other pony, though she would never see it.

I was nearing the end of the project when the overhead lights clicked off. Night time. My paintbrush and I both froze, and I blinked and squinted in a panic. This had to be finished.

There was a click behind me, and a soft, wide beam of light was cast on the wall. It wobbled, and my shoulder cast a fuzzy shadow over half the mural. Seconds later, another light clicked on. And another.

For the first time that day, I turned. A half-dozen PipBuck-sized flashlights blazed across my vision, obscuring manes and faces. But they could all see me. I smiled broadly and mouthed, “Thank you.”

There was only one feature of the mural left to paint. With black paint only slightly dilluted, a pony's shadow stretched down the stairs. The perpetually clouded sky didn't cast shadows like that, but I could picture the shape perfectly.

Nopony else in the Stable would ever know her face or her voice, but they would know who she was. My friend, my saviour, my guide, returning with the day's meal, safe and sound.

I wasn't ready for the world above. Not yet. I doubted that many of the ponies around me were either. It was desolate and violent, and the stark beauty of Equestria's wreckage was a fragile illusion, shattered by one night in a cage and a few ugly drawings. But hidden in corners, there was real beauty, and real meaning. I heard it in Velvet's song over the radio, and in Duster's voice as he described Littlepip's heroism. Maybe Velvet was dead in a gutter somewhere while her music lived on. Maybe Littlepip was just another thug with a gun who found her way onto a radio DJ's good side. But those moments of actual joy… nothing could take them away.

And when I was hauled in front of the Overmare for the second time in as many days, I didn't stop smiling, because no matter how cold and dismissive her tone, or how discouraging her words, I knew that my mural would survive. And I knew that one day, it wouldn't be the only piece of the surface down in Stable Two.

Author's Note

Thanks to Chaotic Dreams for pre-reading.

The Running of the Sharps

A young stallion crouched behind the remains of a house, his ears pricked. His gun, a fearsome pellet rifle, floated next to him, surrounded in a gentle orange glow.

The colt glanced around the corner, then flinched back. Ritually. Methodically. No bullets raced toward him, because he was alone, and the camp was abandoned. Honestly, he was too old to play those kind of games. Phoenix slumped, sighed, and stepped out into the open.

One day he'd find an active raider camp, or maybe a bandit patrol. Anything would be an improvement over day-old corpses of the vaguely criminal and definitively homeless.

The bodies lay here and there, victims of some other intrepid wasteland adventurer. Phoenix prodded at the first few corpses. Nothing. Not even a bent bottle cap. He stood and looked around at the splintered barrels and open, ransacked hooflockers. Thoroughly looted. Why did everypony have to be so damn meticulous? For a moment, he reconsidered, eyeing the torn and bloodstained sets of barding that covered the dead raiders.

But no. They were probably all filled with piss and shit from their last moments, and it wouldn't fit very well anyway. And even besides all that, his parents would have a fit if he came home dressed like a bloodsoaked raider. Then they'd ground him, or worse, make Dawn stay home to babysit him. Sometimes he wondered why he went home at all. There was plenty of crappy food out in the wasteland, only marginaly worse than his mom's cooking.

The faint clatter of gunmetal and the creak of aged leather caught his ear. Somepony was trotting past, just outside the camp.

With his lips pressed tight and his heart racing, Phoenix darted back under the cover of a nearby tent. He happened to land on top of a corpse, his face inches from the mare's putrid, lolling mouth. Phoenix wrinkled his nose and turned his face away. From what he knew about raiders, death might have actually improved her natural odor.

Hoofsteps approached and retreated. Phoenix chanced a look and froze. A young earth pony mare, in neat cloth barding, with a sturdy pistol dangling from her hip. What the heck was Dawn doing there? Their parents would flip if they found out that she'd come this far west. If only there was a way for him to snitch on her without getting into even more trouble himself.

Dawn paused, and Phoenix leaned back in time to avoid her gaze. He saw a flash of purple tail and orange flank as she continued across the plains, headed even further westward.

He waited a moment, until the sound of her rusted pistol clanking against her side faded on the wind. He appraised the trash pile of a camp once more, then ducked his head, stowed his weapon, and hurried after his older sister.

The wasteland surrounding Appleloosa was full of cool little places. Apparently lots of pre-war ponies figured the empty Equestrian desert would be a good place to build their personal bomb shelters, so even after two hundred years there was still salvage to be found for brave scavengers like Phoenix. Or at least there would be, if he was ever allowed to leave town.

From behind the crest of a distant hill, Phoenix watched as Dawn hurried toward what looked like a little chimney poking up through the hard dirt. He knew that those were air intakes, and were supposed to filter out all the magical radiation so the ponies inside the shelter could breathe. Once bombs started falling and ponies ran to their hidey-holes, it turned out that most of them didn't work very well.

Dawn circled the protruding pipe, stomping her hooves with each step. Halfway through her circuit, she paused and started to scrape at the dirt. When she lowered her face to the ground, mouth open and teeth parted, Phoenix looked away. He always felt weird watching earth ponies use their mouths for stuff. After a moment he looked back. Dawn had flung open a hidden hatch and descended into the bomb shelter.

Phoenix dropped to his belly, crossed his forelegs, and rested his chin on his hooves. If Dawn was scavenging this far away from Appleloosa, then he'd have to start doing it too. Maybe there'd actually be things left for him to find, for once. And now he knew better than to bring them home.

He unslung his pellet gun, set it on the ground, and looked it over. It never failed to impress the other colts and fillies his age. It was all steel and wood, heavy and sturdy, and it even smelled a bit like gunpowder, which made the fact that it could only fire plastic or rubber bullets even more galling. It had been a real gun when he found it, half-buried under a tree north of town. He'd taken it to his parents, gleeful like a puppy, certain that they'd fix it up and sell it, or maybe even return it to him as a present. Instead they gutted it, ripped out the pin and narrowed the barrel, and turned it into a toy.

He had a hidden place for his stuff now. All he kept there was a little pouch of bottle caps, bobby pins, and some kind of drug syringe. One day he'd work up the courage to sell the chem to Ditzy. Anypony else would tell on him, but Ditzy was cool.

Movement caught his eye. Dawn climbed out of the shelter, kicked the hatch closed, and turned toward the south. It was hard to tell from so far away, but it looked like her pack was still nearly empty.

Phoenix rose to his hooves, stowed his gun again, and carefully trotted after her, low to the ground and through sparse grass, behind hills and chunks of rubble. It was hard to be sneaky in the desert, but he had nearly a decade of practice. Still, he was careful. Dawn had even more experience out in the wastes, and she had a working gun. She probably wouldn't fire blindly if she noticed somepony stalking her, but it wasn't worth the risk. And if their parents found out she'd shot him, they'd probably still find a way to blame him for it.

He hesitated by the bomb shelter. Dawn had tossed all the dirt off of the hatch when she opened it and hadn't bothered to cover it back up. Anypony passing within a hundred feet could notice it and strip the shelter bare. She hadn't been in there very long; she might have missed something. His heart trotted in his chest, and with a firm telekinetic pull, he swung the hatch open again. A glance across the clear, empty desert, to his sister's distant shape moving steadily west, and he knew he'd have no trouble finding her again.

The steel stairs were as perfect as the day they were made. Somehow, with each step down into the dark, the room felt smaller, the ceiling lower. He concentrated for a moment, and warm orange light bathed the walls.

The shelter was round, like an aluminum can somepony had buried underground, and the ceiling was every inch as low as it felt, leaving barely a foot of space between his head and the concrete. The room was ringed with shelves, drawers, cabinets and cubbies. A fine layer of dust covered every surface, save for a few streaks here or there, where a mouth had pulled open a drawer, or a hoof had brushed across a table.

In the center of the room lay a skeleton. A time-ravaged vest was still wrapped around its shoulders. Phoenix walked up and pressed a curious hoof to vest's pocket. Loot! He quickly levitated the bounty up into the air, where they caught and reflected the light from his horn in a dazzling array. A pair of golden discs, thick and heavy, with tiny printing on both sides. He'd seen pre-war bits before, but they'd all been dinged up and dusty. Nopony used gold for anything in the wasteland, but that didn't make them any less cool. He tucked them into his empty saddlebag, then gave the skeleton a cheerful pat on the shoulder. “Thanks, buddy.”

It wasn't hard to see where Dawn had already searched. Earth ponies weren't the most delicate scavengers, and she probably hadn't cared about covering her tracks. He pulled open the first drawer beside the stairs and nearly whinnied in surprise. Cutlery, the kind that only Tenpony snobs used. They were worth their weight as scrap metal, though. He peered deeper inside and saw an even greater treasure. A short, fat knife, double-edged, with a tapered handle. This wasn't for eating, or for cooking. It was a killing knife. Phoenix snatched it up in his magic without hesitation, waved it around a few times, and then slid it into his pack alongside the bits. He'd have to make some kind of badass holster for it later.

He looked through the next few cupboards with renewed interest. They were all packed with things less exciting but still useful and valuable: food preserves, cleaning solution, sheets of fabric, and even a kit of basic medical supplies. The last item had obviously been handled, examined, and replaced. One piece had been removed, leaving a syringe-shaped divot in the kit.

A shot of Med-X.

Phoenix glanced back up at the open hatch and the overcast desert sky above, and his excitement was dulled by a sudden wash of worry. With one last regretful look at all the untouched riches surrounding him, he returned above ground and closed the hatch behind him. He did take a moment to brush some dirt over it. For later, he mentally announced.

To the west, the shimmering shape of his older sister plodded onward. Phoenix hoisted his bag and followed.

The desert was rockier, bumpier, and even a bit less dry out west. Phoenix took advantage of the terrain to close the distance between himself and his quarry, slipping from rock to bush to rusted road sign until Dawn was only a hundred or so feet away. Her shadow stretched long and soft across the cracked earth as the sun began its slow descent and the far horizon was painted a muddy brown. The cloud cover seemed lighter than usual, and the sun's light more piercing. That would be Phoenix's excuse for not noticing the camp sooner.

The shaky road ahead dipped into a narrow canyon with sheer, rocky cliffs to either side. A barricade of recovered wood and scrap metal choked the passage even further, and finally there was a pony. They leaned against the rock wall, eyes fixed on Dawn's approaching form. His sister's stride didn't falter for a moment, nor did she draw her weapon.

Phoenix drew up short, glanced around, then circled to the right, skirting across the road and darting through a narrow channel where a stream might once have flowed. Now the ground was dry and chalky beneath his hooves. He crept forward, climbing the gentle incline until he drew level with the waiting pony. He peeked down into the valley and observed his sister.

“Hold it,” the stallion said—probably a stallion, from the voice. “Where the fuck are you going?”

Dawn mumbled something, as she usually did. Phoenix winced for her.

“What? Speak up for fuck's sake.”

She straightened her neck and sneered. “West.”

“Pfft,” the stallion chortled, “you sound like a fuckin' colt. Need a drink or something?”

Dawn shook her head. She bared her teeth as they passed near her pistol. “Just a shot or two of Med-X. Got any to spare?” Her words were tinged with bitter sarcasm.

“Oh ho, of course we do, for a sweet mare such as yourself.” The stallion stepped back and gestured into the valley. “Come on in. Our… eh, doctor, would be happy to help 'ya.”

She flashed him a dazzling smile, the kind she rarely pulled out in Appleloosa, and moved closer. Inches from the doorway, she struck.

Her shoulder slammed into the stallion's chest, and they both careened behind the wooden cover. Bullets flew through the opening, cracking against rock and earth. Dawn wrapped her forelegs around the stallion's neck and swung him off his hooves, the tendons in her legs straining. He was unconscious before the next volley of gunfire was loosed. Splinters filled the air.

Phoenix lost sight of her in the cloud of debris, and he looked around in a panic. Further into the valley, a miniature army of scary ponies assembled, grabbing guns from holsters or nearby furniture. In a single glance across the camp, he counted eight ponies. His useless, declawed rifle found its way into the air, held aloft by his magic. Reflex, he supposed, or maybe just what he thought he was supposed to do.

Dawn drew her pistol and clenched it tight between her teeth, then chanced a look around the barricade. A millisecond later she jerked back, bullets flying out after her. One heartbeat, two, and she rounded the corner and dove, emptying her pistol as she raced for cover. Two of her shots found flesh. A burly mare fell to the ground with a scarlet hole in her forehead, and a unicorn staggered backward, blood flowing from a deep rake in his shoulder. Dawn fetched up against a sturdy barrel. She flinched as more bullets perforated the other side and sent shockwaves through the wood. With dexterity Phoenix would never have imagined, she released her empty magazine and loaded another.

Three more bandits opened fire through the valley, round after round slamming into her improvised cover. The barrel didn't last long under the onslaught, and in seconds it was reduced to a pile of wood chips and a pair of metal bands. Dawn was already gone. She scurried across the ground, dodged under a folding table, and disappeared into an enclosed tent. Bullets tore through the fabric and disappeared in kind. The valley fell still and quiet for a split second.

Phoenix tensed. Another glance reassured him that nopony was aiming his way, and he darted forward, descending the slope and circling around to the back of the camp, where the fortifications were less impressive. The barricade was the same as on the far side, but the sentry had clearly been pulled away by Dawn's explosive entrance. He slipped into the canyon, the tip of his rifle leading the way. Wild cracks of sound filled the air, lead smashing into rock. Yells, grunts, roars. Phoenix ran into the nearest tent. His magic was tense against the trigger of his gun, ready to fire at the first sign of movement. Enough pellets to the face would stop a pony just as well as a real bullet. Probably. Hopefully.

Hooves galloped past the tent, gunfire cracking between steps. Phoenix peaked out and glanced both ways. A mass of muzzle flares, dust, and swearing in one direction, silence in the other. He darted across the valley to the next tent. At the entrance, he paused, and he turned. Lying the middle of the canyon was a mare, a bullet hole through her brain. He had stepped over the corpse without a thought. There, beside her death-stiffened limbs, lay a rusted submachine gun. He grabbed it in his magic and dragged it closer. Once they were both hidden behind canvas, he dropped his fake rifle and pulled the real deal in close. He could only assume it was loaded.

The canvas rustled beside him, and his heart leapt into his throat. He dove for the far side of the tent and fell to his belly, slipping beneath the loose material. It draped over him like a blanket. A pony entered the tent, breathing hard and heavy. He could barely see her silhouette through the thick canvas. It sounded like Dawn. He nearly stood up and revealed himself, but he wasn't supposed to be out this far. If these bandits didn't kill him, Dawn would, and if she didn't, their parents would. Bullets ripped through the tent, in one side and out the other, and Dawn disappeared in a blur of trailing hair and flailing hooves. The sudden explosion of motion and sound sent a jolt racing through him, and he nearly jumped right out into the open, into the middle of the valley.

He trembled, and the ground tilted a bit, and he was glad to be lying down. With all the steadiness he could muster, Phoenix rolled back into the tent and gathered his shaking legs beneath him. He levitated the machine gun to his head height and held it steady. Even with every muscle in his body tense and quivering, his telekinesis was solid and certain. He could do this. He peeked through the tent flap.

Two ponies advanced through the canyon. The unicorn carried a shotgun in her magic. The other, a massive earth pony stallion, wore the bulkiest, scariest battle-saddle Phoenix had ever seen. Two giant miniguns were attached to either side. The huge black barrels spun slowly, the motors whirring like thirsty cats. Dawn was nowhere to be seen. Apart from the two encroaching bandits, the valley was deathly still.

Now he was trapped. He couldn't move without giving himself away, not even an inch, but any second they could glance his way, and they'd draw level with his hiding place with just a few more steps. His back hooves dug little divots into the dry earth.

A gust of wind rose up, whistling through the valley and catching loose ends of fabric and lengths of rope. Halfway through camp, not twenty feet from the two bandits, a lock of purple hair danced in the breeze, and whipped and snapped just above a stack of crates.

The miniguns roared to life, and the hair, the crates, the whole valley disappeared in a cloud of dust, smoke, sparks, and splinters. Phoenix lurched back into the safety of the tent and backed up until his rump poked out the opening on the other side. His borrowed submachine gun never left his side, and it's aim never moved from the earth pony's hulking form. His heart raced and pumped frigid blood through his veins. Dawn had to be dead. They killed his stupid fucking sister and he hadn't done a thing to stop it.

The roar of the miniguns fell to the hiss of steam and the clatter of discarded casings across the ground. “Fuck!” shouted the stallion through clenched teeth. “Did I get her at least?”

“Doesn't look like.” Hoofsteps, barely heard over the ringing in Phoenix's ears. “Bitch has good aim. Or she's fucking lucky,” the mare commented. “Is it deep?”

“Shut the fuck up.” A pause. “No, I'm fine. Grazed me.” The miniguns spun again. Spun, but didn't fire. “She's gotta be in there.”

“Probably.”

“What's in that tent?”

“That was Tanner's.” The mare sniffed dismissively. “Dead now.” The motor revved. “Hold it,” she muttered. “Let me get into position.”

A grunt. “Just say the word.” The mare vaulted over a stack of boxes and circled around the tent.

Phoenix took the opportunity to slip back into cover.

They way they were talking made him think maybe Dawn had gotten away, somehow. She always was a lot faster than her short legs and stubby barrel suggested. But, as far as he knew, this was her first fight. She had never mentioned shooting at ponies before, or being shot at. She'd never come home bleeding or even badly bruised. His mind was reeling, and his hooves and face were starting to tingle. He had to focus. After all, there was still a chance Dawn's corpse was lying under a pile of rubble a stone's throw away and he was alone in the valley with a bunch of murdering bandits.

With pricked ears, Phoenix retraced his steps. He slid out the far side of the tent and peeked around the corner.

The bandit mare stood nearly opposite the stallion, across the passage from Phoenix with her back to him. She leveled her shotgun at the tent, then leaned around its side and nodded at her partner.

Everything happened really fast.

Phoenix charged across the valley, directly toward the mare. Her shotgun kicked once, the muzzle flare nearly blinding him, and then he was on top of her. He jammed the barrel of his new machine gun to her upper back and mashed the trigger home. Above the frenzied sound of automatic gunfire, he heard metal against bone, and he heard blood and meat splatter to the ground. A choked, raspy scream escaped the mare's mouth, and her eyes rolled back so far that he could swear she was looking right at him.

He leapt over the broken, dying bandit and dove toward the nearest cover, a few sandbags stacked atop one another. He fell to his barrel, legs splayed, and pressed his ears down. He could imagine the minigun spinning faster, faster, and then loosing its payload. A few mouldy sandbags wouldn't stand up against that. In a second, his cover would be scattered to the desert winds, and then he'd be as much hole as he was whole.

And the minigun whirred. The motor growled. The roar of bullet fire cracked through the valley like an angry dragon. Phoenix winced. When he didn't die, he paused. A second or two later, and he tentatively glanced over the top of his cover.

The tent the two bandits had sighted lay demolished, the fabric so thoroughly perforated that it resembled a net more than a single sheet of canvas. The interior was a mess of splintered wood and scattered belongings. A flash of blue and purple blurred past the remains of the tent. A few clear, decisive bullet cracks rang over the minigun fire. The beefy stallion growled past the bit in his mouth and swung around, clumsily following his target. The canyon's rock walls fractured and cracked from the sudden bullet hail.

The earth pony kept turning. His head weaved and he staggered to the side. His minigun spun to a hissing stop, and once again the valley fell quiet, save for the groan of leather and the slow clatter of gun metal. The stallion breathed hard, and as the dust began to settle Phoenix saw several crimson trails running down his body. From his leg, his barrel, down the side of his neck. But somehow, the beast was still standing, albeit not very steadily.

Once again, Dawn was nowhere in sight.

Phoenix's heart was probably still racing, but for some reason he couldn't tell for sure. He jerked to his hooves and vaulted the pile of sandbags. He swerved and leapt over the ruins of the camp, bodies and weapons and tattered tent cloth, the huge stallion quickly filling up more and more of his vision. Phoenix aimed his gun, vaguely realizing that he had no idea how much his magazine held, if it had even been full when he found it.

With speed belied by his size, the stallion swung around and leaned forward. Six giant barrels of death filled Phoenix's vision, and the colt quickly realized that he was screwed. Sure, the minigun couldn't be spun up to speed in time to stop him, but he was outweighed by hundreds of pounds. One good punch, or even a shove, and the earth pony would have all the time he needed. In desperation, Phoenix leveled his weapon and fired. His aim was off, and the rounds clipped into the large stallion's chest and shoulder before veering up into the canyon wall beyond.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Dawn—actually saw her, not just a glimpse or a hint. She stood tall, eyes fixed on the earth pony, her pistol held carefully in her mouth. She fired, and the recoil snapped her neck to the side.

Bang.

The stallion crumpled, eyes wide. Blood pooled in the dirt beneath his head and trickled downhill toward Dawn, growing thinner and murkier as it absorbed grit and sand. Phoenix shivered. They were both standing there in the open, target practice for any passers-by. His vision swam, his limbs jittered with nervous energy, but he couldn't move, and he couldn't look away.

And the world slowed right down.

There was a muted scream to his right, choked and shrill.

Dawn stalked toward him, her gun still clenched between her teeth. The pistol's barrel shook, and Phoenix wondered again who would be in more trouble if she shot him.

She stood across from him, eyes hard and narrow, and looked him up and down. Her gaze lingered on his legs for a moment, and he realized that they were flecked with blood. His belly, where his coat was thinnest, tingled at the edges of perception. He must have scraped it raw while diving into cover. She stared at the gun floating beside him, and when he followed her cue he noticed the dozens of straight, careful notches scratched into both sides of the receiver. A tally, easily over thirty marks on the side facing his way. Numbly, he turned it over.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Dawn snarled.

He snapped his head back to face her. She'd put her gun away, at least, but now she was inches from his face, eyes flaring and chest heaving, her ears pinned back and her shoulders tense. He took a step back, ready to leap aside if she came any closer. “Uh…” He tried desperately to focus, to remember and interpret whatever she'd just said. His hind hoof slipped in a slimy puddle of sand and blood.

“Are you following me? You'd better not be fuck—” Her voice broke suddenly, veering down into a lower, louder pitch. He flinched, but she didn't even pause for a second. “—ing with me right now. I have shit to do, and you can take a back seat for once in your fucking life.”

She usually didn't swear this much. Or stand this close to ponies. Or raise her voice above a low, conversational hush. Phoenix's nerves, which were only just starting to recover, frayed and twisted.

“And stop aiming that thing at me, or I'll beat you with it till you black out.”

In a heartbeat, his telekinesis winked out and the machine gun fell to the ground. He had forgotten he was holding it.

Her snarl slowly faded into an irritated scowl. She turned her back and crouched down to inspect the nearest pile of debris, apparently content to ignore him. Her intense, focused search shook something free from the maelstrom of his thoughts, and the thought flew out his mouth. “Are you a chem fiend?” he blurted.

“What?” she said, and spun back to face him. She sounded genuinely baffled. “A chem… how do you…” Her frown deepened, and soon enough turned back into a glare. She took a sudden step forward. “Have you been spying on me?” she growled.

“Med-X,” Phoenix sputtered. “In the bunker, all you took—”

“The bunker?” And again, inexplicably, she seemed to calm down. “You searched the bunker? That bunker?”

“You left it all open and uncovered, so I wanted to take a look inside before it all disappeared.” He swallowed. For some reason he was starting to feel really tired. Bone tired. Swaying on his hooves tired. “There was a ton of stuff worth taking in there, but I think all you wanted was the Med-X. A-are you in trouble? I promise I won't tell if you are.” Unless it was really bad. Like if Dawn was actually addicted, or if she'd fallen in with some kind of gang—not that he'd ever heard of gangs near Appleloosa.

It was nearly dusk, and the desert was already cooling, the meager daylight fading. If they went straight home, they might make it before dark.

Dawn grimaced and glanced back at her bags. “It's not for me,” she said at last.

“Is it for Candi?” She was the closest thing New Appleloosa had to a doctor. Their parents sold most of the chems and medicine they found to her at a big discount. But she wouldn't buy combat chems, like the contraband syringe Phoenix had squirreled away.

Dawn flinched, her eyes bulged, and her face reddened. She looked ready to run for the hills. “No! I mean, no, it's for her patients!”

He blinked. “That's what… what I meant.”

Their eyes met. Phoenix saw something in hers. A wild, panicked anger. An anger with no target in particular. Then it softened, because she was seeing something in his eyes in turn.

She glanced to the ground. “How about a deal?” she asked, soft and feminine again. “You go home right away, and you don't tell Mom and Dad I was out here, or about the Med-X. When I get back to New Appleloosa, I won't mention that you were out here too.”

“I'm staying with you,” Phoenix said. “Something's wrong, and—” The horizon swayed before his eyes. He wondered if he was having a heart attack. “I don't… whatever's going on, I'm staying with you.”

“Are you okay… is everything—hey, Phoenix?” Dawn moved closer. She lifted a hoof to his side, and he couldn't help but lean into it. She lowered him gently to the ground. Everything was dark and blurry, and he almost giggled at how strange it felt. “Stay there,” she muttered soothingly. “I'll… I won't go anywhere either.”

Metal against bone. He wondered where his pellet rifle was. He remembered dropping it.

Blood and meat. A raspy scream. Panicked, bloodshot eyes stared down at him from the twilight sky above.

He missed his rifle.

And the sky blurred and darkened into nothing.

“… Fucking stubborn old bitch…”

Phoenix shot upright, sleep retreating at the edges of his vision. The surrounding canyon was just as fragmented and bloodsoaked as his most vivid nightmares suggested. He couldn't see Dawn anywhere. He winced and curled back up. His eyes squeezed closed, he pulled his legs in tight, and he hoped that if he just slept for a few hours more, the world would change around him.

A moment passed.

“Phoenix…”

He stirred, only barely acknowledging the voice. His chin emerged from his blanket and his eyes flicked open for a split second.

“I saw that. Get up. We need to move.”

He snuggled tighter, and pulled the blanket over his head. Anything to distance himself from the familiar voice of the real world.

“Sorry, bro, but that's not going to fly today.” A pair of jaws ripped the blanket away, and the cold desert winds assailed his underside. Phoenix rolled over and hunched his shoulders, his eyes still pressed shut, but already the veil of sleep was starting to fade. He raised his head and blinked against the dark blue horizon. Why was it still night? He felt like he'd been drugged. His muscles were sore and twitchy, and a weight pressed on his thoughts, suppressing and distorting them into shapes unrecognizable.

He'd been talking. Talking to Dawn. He could just barely remember the wave of fatigue and vertigo that had swept his legs out from under him. Shit, had he fainted?

It took a few tries to get his hooves back under him. He looked around at the wreckage. It was mostly unchanged from the previous night. A shattered camp, assailed with heavy gunfire and the stampede of dozens of hooves. The few tents that were still standing were laced with bullet holes, the few intact boxes and craters covered in a thick coating of dust. The sky above was murky.

Dawn was nowhere to be seen. Hadn't she just spoken to him?

The crate of cloth and linens was still untouched, right where he'd seen it during the fight. Other valuable items were scattered around, also unlooted. Preserved food, guns and ammo, medical supplies, although notably not Med-X. He even found a health potion nestled within a coil of braided rope, which he chugged down without thinking. Immediately his body felt lighter, and his head less woolen. He looked down at the empty bottle, winced, and tossed it into a nearby pile of debris. Better if Dawn didn't find out that he'd wasted a perfectly good healing potion.

Phoenix finally found his sister at the mouth of the canyon. She was crouched behind a cluster of boulders, munching on a snack cake. Her ears pricked and swiveled to follow his steps.

He cleared his throat.

She turned and opened her mouth, only for cake crumbs to slip from between her lips. “Oh, sorry,” she muttered, hastily covering her mouth with a hoof. “Uh, that was the last one.”

Phoenix shrugged. He wasn't really hungry. “Are you done with the camp?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Let's get one thing straight. If you're going to tag along, no more questions. I'm sick of explaining myself.”

The urge to argue rose suddenly and violently, and a short list of Dawn's few mistakes appeared in his mind, cross-indexed both chronologically and in order of magnitude. He swallowed it down and said, “Okay. I'm sorry.”

She kept the glare up for another few seconds. “Good. Get your stuff. You made us waste hours already.”

He nodded and trotted back into the canyon, his mind racing. So, whatever Dawn was up to, it was time sensitive. She only seemed to care about gathering Med-X, and apparently she needed a significant quantity to boot. She had definitely already found one dose, if the medical kit in the bunker was any indication, but she hadn't used it yet. Probably. Phoenix didn't really know what a Med-X high was like, but he had heard it made ponies mellow and blissful, and so far Dawn seemed louder, angrier, and more aggressive than ever.

So was she really just trying to help out Candi? New Appleloosa always needed medical supplies, but Dawn had never acted so single-mindedly before. Was there somepony in town that needed Med-X really badly, and more than just a few doses? It didn't make any sense.

He hefted his bags and, after a long moment's consideration, the submachine gun as well. It wasn't pretty like his pellet rifle, but he didn't need pretty out here. He needed to protect himself. And his sister.

He took another look around the ruined camp. In twenty minutes, he could probably strip it of all of its small valuables. More than enough to justify Dawn's long absence, and maybe enough to get him off the hook as well. He sighed and cantered back toward Dawn. In truth, they could bring home a working PipBuck, or a live Balefire bomb, or a hundred thousand caps, and they'd still be in just as much trouble.

“Fucking finally,” Dawn muttered. She grabbed her own saddlebags from the ground nearby, shouldered them, and gestured off into the distant desert. “Come on.”

There ceased to be a road this far out. Apparently the canyon marked the frontier of pre-war Equestria, and beyond that there was only dirt and dunes and desolation. Dawn didn't hesitate.

After minutes scraping their hooves across hard gritty terrain, Phoenix bit his lip and glanced to Dawn, who moved at a canter a few paces ahead. He perfected his words in his head. “I know you said not to ask questions, but—”

“Shut up,” Dawn growled, low enough that the wind almost swept it away. Phoenix was so prepared for it that he broke off anyway.

“I just want to know if we're actually going somewhere,” he continued. “Cause it kind of seems like we're in the middle of nowhere.”

Dawn pursed her lips. “I know what I'm doing. Unless we already missed it. You picked a bad time for a nap.”

Phoenix frowned. His hooves thumped against the ground a bit faster. He still didn't know how long he'd been asleep. Based on the sky alone, it had either been a couple hours or an entire day. Or multiple days, but he didn't want to even consider that possibility. Their parents would actually skin them.

The sun rose steadily, and soon Phoenix had it figured out. Three or four hours at most. Probably only three. He was too exhausted and Dawn was still too high-strung for it to have been multiple days. Were they meeting a train, maybe? No, if three hours didn't make any difference, a full day wouldn't either. And there weren't any train tracks out this far anyway. A caravan? Those didn't stick around, and they didn't announce their schedules. No way Dawn could know down to the day where one would be. Pegasi?

He tried not to think too hard about that last one.

By noon his frogs and hoof-tips were tingling. He somehow still wasn't hungry, but his mouth was dry and aching for water. He paused at one point to look through his bag, but all he'd packed were tools. He'd expected an afternoon over familiar hills, after all, not a cross country hike. He licked his lips, which only made them sting more, and fought for the courage to ask his sister for a break. Why was he suddenly so afraid of her? He never had been before.

His heart shrank. He'd never seen her kill a pony before, either.

“Stay low and stay quiet,” Dawn said, finally breaking the silence. “We're getting close.”

Phoenix craned his neck and peered out at the near featureless wasteland before them. Save a few gentle hills and clusters of cacti, there was nothing to break his line of sight until the horizon.

“How can you tell?”

“I said be quiet.”

His nose wrinkled, but he shut up anyway. He glared out across the wastes, daring anything distinguishable to show its face.

The hills rose on either side, and soon the siblings plunged between them.

Dawn swerved to the left, toward a rocky outcropping, and Phoenix followed dutifully. As they grew closer, the outcropping became an entryway, and soon enough Phoenix was able to distinguish a worn wooden door set into the stone. Some kind of cave, then.

Dawn drew her pistol and held it carefully between her teeth.

“Are we…” Phoenix undid the clasp of his saddlebag with some hesitation. “Are there ponies in there?”

Dawn didn't respond, but she also didn't lower her weapon.

Phoenix withdrew the battered machine gun and held it close.

In the distance, a patch of rock by the entrance shifted, warped, and materialized into a familiar shape. A unicorn stepped away from the rock wall. Their horn glowed, casting light across the stone around them, and a long gun floated into the air. The barrel pivoted to face them, nearly turning into a single point. Nearly.

Phoenix whirled. “Get—”

A small explosion resounded across the wastes, and Dawn collapsed to the ground. A red mist filled the air, and it took Phoenix a moment to process what was adrenaline pounding behind his eyes and what was real. He ducked backward and crawled, on knees and fetlocks, toward his downed sister.

“Dawn?”

“Shh!” she whispered breathlessly. Blood leaked from her side, staining her leather barding a dark brown. “Maybe he… only saw me.” She squeezed her eyes closed. “Fuck…”

Phoenix stayed prone, his belly to the gritty ground. He pulled his saddlebags off and reached a hoof inside, searching for something, anything, that could help. Why had he drank that healing potion earlier? Because he'd been tired. Shit.

“Don't move,” he said. “I'll…”

“What? Shoot them? From here?” Dawn asked. “Stay down. I'll…” Dawn twisted, her forelegs scrabbling at the earth. She hissed. “I'll handle it.” Her sides heaved.

He began to shift closer, then flinched back as another gunshot rang out overhead. Nothing stood between them and the shooter but a few tufts of knee-high desert weeds. Phoenix reached out a hoof. “How bad is it?”

She cringed away from him. “Don't… touch. It's fine.”

Phoenix craned his neck and peered at the very edges of his vision. An indistinct, pony-sized shape moved slowly but confidently closer, the rifle still raised in a steady cloud of telekinesis. Seconds and breaths passed languidly. Phoenix could imagine himself through this pony's eyes, through the rifle's sights. An vague lump, nearly invisible against the dull terrain. Even a small movement would break that illusion and outline him perfectly. Camouflage into target practice.

Millimeter by millimeter, Phoenix magically dragged the machine gun closer to his body. At the same time, he felt the weight of his saddlebags. Examined the contour where the rawhide touched his coat.

In one motion, he wrapped his magic around them, rolled to the side, and lobbed his bags into the air, toward the approaching pony. Three quick gunshots split the silence in succession.

Phoenix jumped to his hooves, lifted his gun, and staggered forward. They were on a slight slope, so he ended up half sprinting, half falling most of the way.

It was a young stallion, probably only a few years older than him, although Phoenix sucked at guessing ponies' ages. He could have been halfway to thirty. His yellow coat glowed in the sickly desert sun, and if he had a mane it was too fine for Phoenix to discern from so far away. Scars crisscrossed his face and neck, and a few long ones ran across the stallion's chest. Phoenix had no idea what could cause something like that. Knife fights, maybe?

His eyes were narrowed and focused, and he pivoted his rifle toward his target without a moment's hesitation.

Phoenix careened closer. He could feel his knees buckling and his center of gravity pitching forward, his hooves starting to slip out from under him. He kicked off with his hind legs in an attempt to wring out every inch of distance he could. Another gunshot. Phoenix's ears flattened instinctively, but he didn't break stride. He couldn't, at that point. There was no impact, no pain, nothing, so the shot probably went wide.

The stallion's eyes flared wide, and the glow of his telekinesis undulated, making the tip of his gun wobble and shake ever so slightly. He started to scurry backward, and Phoenix spotted a cutie mark as the stallion's hips shifted back and forth. A silver paperclip, pristine and glinting. Phoenix wasn't sure there were any paperclips like that left in all of Equestria. His cutie mark story must be one hell of a tale.

Phoenix held out his fully automatic weapon and emptied the clip, point blank, into the stallion's face.

Orange. The stallion's mane was orange. It was just shaved so close that it was nearly invisible.

Phoenix's momentum finally died, and he toppled sideways. He slid a short distance. The ground pulled and jabbed at his coat, and finally he came to a dizzying, sprawling halt. Stars danced in his eyes and colours swam at the edges of perception. Suddenly the ground was very comfortable, something to lean and depend on. If he hadn't killed the orange pony, Phoenix thought, then so be it. Then they'd lost and the bad guys won. Big deal. He pressed his eyes closed once, trying to dispel some of the static, then again, more slowly. It was getting harder to open them back up again.

A throaty gasp came from somewhere up the hill.

Phoenix jerked back to his hooves and clambered back to his injured and maybe dying sister.

“I heard that,” Dawn growled as he approached. “All of it. Did you get him?”

Phoenix shrugged. “Yeah.” He reached down again and stopped, his hoof poised inches from her side.

Dawn looked up at him and huffed, then wobbled, grumbled, and stood up, shoving him aside in the process. She peered down the slope at the mound of bloody orange hair, and she started down the slope. After a few steps she pivoted to keep her wound out of his sight.

Reluctantly, Phoenix followed her. He kept his eyes off the mess, instead choosing to focus on the cave. A wooden door was wedged into the entrance. It wasn't much more than a few mismatched and misshapen pieces of lumber hastily nailed together. The rough shape of an eyeball was scratched into the wood. An eyeball.

“Phew, you really did a number on this guy,” Dawn commented. She leaned down to search the pony's pockets and suppressed a gasp of pain. She recovered quickly. “He didn't get you at all?” she asked.

“Nope.”

Dawn kicked something toward him. “Here. Just like you've always wanted.”

Phoenix glanced down. It was the stallion's rifle. Not dissimilar to his old pellet gun, but infinitely more deadly. He glanced between it and the machine gun he'd left in the dirt where he'd fallen, then levitated the rifle into the air. Its weight felt good. Familiar. He started to tuck it inside his bag, then looked back at the cave and thought better of it.

On second thought, maybe the submachine gun would be a good idea as well.

“Find anyth—any Med-X?” He chanced a look Dawn's way and saw a splatter of red on the ground and a jumble of sprawled limbs. His throat clenched tight and shivers lanced through his extremities.

“Would you cool it on the questions?” She turned and appraised him with a scowl. Her expression quickly faded into concern. “Actually, maybe you should head home. You're looking a little… uh…”

“What? Exhausted? Dehydrated? Frustrated?” He cleared his throat and trotted over to the cavern door. “Come on, let's just shoot whoever's in there or whatever.”

She trotted a circle past him and held up a leg, barring his way. “I was going to say 'dead,' actually. Was he…” She glanced past him toward the corpse. “Was that your first kill?”

He snorted and thought back to the mare in the canyon. “Nope. Is that your first bullet wound?”

“Nope.”

“Then I guess we're both fine.”

Her nostrils flared, but she dropped her leg. “I… I guess we are.”

The mid-day sun burned the clouds above a deep red, and the winds licked every few seconds, reminding them for a second what comfort felt like.

Dawn cantered past him and shouldered through the doorway. Of course the door wasn't locked. Had he expected bandits to drill a bolt straight into the stone?

He raised the rifle, fiddled with safeties and magazine releases, and then plunged into the cave. It was pitch black aside from the faint blue shining from beyond the doorway. The siblings peered into nothing.

“If you're going to tag along, you could at least give us some light,” Dawn griped. She started forward.

Phoenix concentrated, and a second later his horn erupted into a gentle light, revealing patchy brickwork and pillowy piles of stone powder. Every hoofstep threw clouds of the stuff into the air, choking and blinding them both, and forming dazzling patterns in his horn light.

Crates and boxes of all shapes and sizes lined the walls, and the natural cave floor was covered by planks and grates that were haphazardly hammered into the stone, sloping down further into the earth.

Phoenix's magic had never been especially strong. His light flickered whenever he hoisted his rifle, and his rifle wobbled whenever he aimed or focused his light spell. After the fourth angry glare from Dawn, he slipped the gun through the loops in his backpack. Dawn was clearly a better shot anyway.

The tunnel started to curve, and Dawn drew up close against the inside wall of the turn, then gestured for him to do the same.

“Light up ahead. Kill the horn,” she whispered.

He did so without hesitation, plunging the two of them into almost total darkness. The dim babble of voices touched their ears.

Dawn turned and said, “There's only three, I think. Stay here and watch my back.” She stared at him, as if expecting resistance. Then, slowly, she turned and crept around the corner.

Phoenix took a few more steps forward until flickering firelight caught his eye. Another thirty or so feet down the tunnel, a campsite was erected, and the long shadows of gathered ponies were cast on the walls. He could only pick out two distinct silhouettes, but there were enough indistinct shadows that he could imagine a third. He drew the rifle and ran a hoof over the barrel. He took aim and waited.

Dawn's shape was even less distinct that the ponies around the camp. Her slightly lighter shade of black scuttled forward, darting from alcove to outcropping, and pressing herself to the wall where there was no other shelter. Even knowing she was there, he struggled to keep track of her darting form.

One of the silhouettes circled around the campfire and snatched something from the other. “Enough's enough,” the distant voice muttered. It sounded like a mare. “Go to bed. We need to be ready for that shipment tonight.”

“Fuck off,” growled the other, swinging their forehooves desperately toward the bottle. “I sleep better with a few in me.”

The mare danced backward, casting wild, primal shadows across the cavern. She tutted. “This shit's gonna kill you, you know?” She held the bottle in a single hoof, somehow, then reversed her grip with a quick spin—again, somehow. The contents spilled and sloshed across the stone floor. A few drops splashed into the fire, and whisps of steam filled the air.

“Did you just—” The stallion started forward, then apparently reconsidered. “Just you fucking wait,” he muttered. He retreated and reluctantly curled up beside the fire, still tossing the occasional sour glance toward his companion. “Soon we won't need you anymore, and then you'll be fucked.”

The mare either didn't hear or didn't care, because she soon curled up in kind.

Dawn stepped into the cavern and turned, glueing herself to the wall. The fire would sporatically flare her way, and Phoenix would spy her silhouette against the cold stone walls.

Something blurred past the fireplace, and the wild shadows nearly blinding Phoenix for a second. He fumbled with his gun, and he tugged madly on every switch and latch he thought he needed to. He finally got it primed and centered on the scene unfolding before him.

Dawn reached to her side and drew her pistol. She always amazed him with how natural her gun grip looked, like it was an extension of her, despite simply being gripped between her teeth. She sprinted in a diagonal, almost like a crab, and opened fire. Through flashes of firelight, he saw both prone ponies thrash and sputter, their forelimbs gripping their throats or torsos. Dawn spun on a dime and slid to a perfect stop. An electronic beep echoed through the cave.

Across the camp, a third pony stood, something indistinct levitated beside them. A rock? A grenade? An apple? Phoenix squinted, but the dim light made it impossible to tell. He needed to move closer.

“Who do we have here?” the pony murmured. They stalked closer, narrowly skirting the fire. The object in their grip spun idly, like a child levitating an old toy. “A—”

Phoenix squeezed the trigger, and a single shot rang out.

The threatening pony toppled sideways and disappeared into the fire, replaced by the stench of burning hair and burning flesh.

That made three. Phoenix stumbled forward. “That was all of them, right?” he called. The fire's comforting warmth made him appreciate the desert's unrelenting dry heat even less.

Dawn didn't budge. “I'm standing on a mine,” she said flatly. “If you have a some fancy unicorn spell in store, now would would be the time to pull it out.”

“I can make water boil! Like, forever!” he blurted without thinking. He'd been waiting years for somepony to ask him that question.

She shot him a withering glare. “Could you please take this seriously? I'm a sneeze away from death over here, if you missed it.”

And then he felt stupid. “Sorry, uhh…” He crouched down to take a good look at her hooves. They were impeccably manicured, as usual. In some ways they were the pretty part of her, other than her mane. Slightly less noticeable was the pressure plate beneath her. A single red LED blinked a regular pattern. Huh. “Well… you're the one who stepped on a landmine. So…”

“I'm also the one standing on a landmine!” she all but shrieked. Her voice cracked more than once, veering down into more masculine tones before recovering. “Just… just do something. There should be a pin or something.”

“Or something?”

“Well I don't know. When have I ever played around with explosives?”

“When have I?”

“Just fix it!”

He gritted his teeth. “Luna, fine. Just give me a minute.” He glared at the metal plate beneath her. It looked a lot like the top of any random pre-war oil barrel. He tried to peer underneath it, but all he could make out was a couple wires and a spring. The flashing LED above made it hard for his eyes to adjust. With all the concentration he could muster, he prepared to slice both wires. The steady pulses of his heart shook his vision and his magic, but he held fast. “Be ready to dive,” he warned, a slight hitch to his voice.

“What?”

“On my mark!”

“What?”

He cut the wires. “Now!” he cried, throwing himself backward, toward the fire.

He hit the ground and rolled. He caught himself with a hoof, and glanced behind to find himself inches from the firepit. He sighed, and his breath was accompanied by a puff of soot, then he looked up, to where Dawn was still standing, less than a foot away from the undetonated plate. She glared at him.

“What the fuck was that?”

He jerked to his hooves and said, “I guess I disarmed it.” He offered her a cheeky grin. “What else did you want?”

She grimaced and started forward, but then glanced at the pressure plate and paused. She took several steps back, until her flank was pressed against the cave wall.

“A bit more warning would have been nice.”

“But I disarmed it.”

“I could have died!”

“We could have died like a dozen times each today!” Phoenix shouted. His brow furrowed. “Or… uh… in the last two days.”

Dawn sighed. “It's only been thirty hours or so. We've both slept.”

“You slept? When?” He looked at the ceiling as if it would reveal the answer. He found it soon enough. “Before you left? You planned all this?”

“Of course I did. Couldn't you tell?”

“Honestly, no. Not really.”

Dawn opened her mouth, paused, and glanced at the pressure plate. “Okay, I'm pretty sure it's not going to explode.”

Panic rose in Phoenix's throat. “What if that's just what they wanted us to think that?”

Dawn strode forward, circled the pressure plate, and rolled her eyes. “Then I guess they succeeded.” She hooked a hoof under the plate and pulled. The barrel lid popped up, and Dawn tossed it aside. “Huh.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” she snapped. She set the lid back into place and started to circle the camp. “Help me search.”

He glanced back toward the pressure plate and inched back around the fire. “Med-X?” he asked at last.

“Would you…” she huffed, then her whole body drooped. “Yeah… Med-X.”

He nodded, then started with the nearest crate. Mostly rawhide and leather armour, none of which was likely to fit him. Not that he really cared anymore. He'd seen how ineffective it was. “Why?”

“Why?” Dawn looked down at the nearest corpse and gave it a prod.

Phoenix felt his gourd rise and quickly looked away. He slid open another box. “Come on, I've followed you this far. What's the Med-X for? If you're not an addict then… why?”

“Med-X isn't only for addicts,” she snapped without looking up. “Lots of ponies have pain, and sometimes all they need is a little bit less of it.”

His heart thudded again. “If you're—”

“It's not for me!” Dawn all but shouted. Her sides heaved. She pulled back from the corpse she was searching, growled, then grabbed the pony's barding between her teeth and ripped, gnashed, and tore it apart. “Fuck!”

Phoenix heart was about to explode, but he swallowed the nerves down. “Who is it for?” he asked.

Dawn's entire face screwed tight. She spat out a scrap of leather. “You know Candi's mom?”

Her frankness surprised him. “Uh… you mean Shea?”

“Yes,” Dawn winced. “I mean… she was the town's doctor before Candi stepped up. She was there when we were both born, you know.”

“I know.”

“Yeah.”

Phoenix looked down at the box he'd opened. A cornucopia of chems. He grabbed a single syringe of Med-X and reached for the lid. A shade of red caught his eye, and he quickly swiped the healing potion as well. He knew somepony who might need it.

“Well,” Dawn said, “she's not feeling too hot.”

“She's really sick. Everypony knows.”

Dawn sucked in a sharp breath. “Everypony?”

Phoenix met her eyes and tried to appear sympathetic. “Pretty much,” he admitted.

“Damn,” Dawn muttered. “Candi won't like that. It's supposed to be a secret.”

“Not much of a secret if she stays indoors for two weeks straight,” Phoenix said. “Is she… is she okay?”

Dawn shook her head. “She's dying. And Candi's taking it really hard. I thought… I thought maybe this would help.”

Oh. Huh. Phoenix checked out the next crate. Nothing but empty bottles. He closed it.

“But why just Med-X? Is there a shortage?” he asked.

“No. But it would help Candi's mom the most.”

That sent a dark chill down Phoenix's spine. “You mean… she's really dying?”

“And in a lot of pain,” Dawn confirmed. “But she won't take anything to ease it. She's the selfless type. I guess being a doctor for forty years will do that.” She averted her gaze. “You can probably empathize.”

He thought back to the healing potion he'd quaffed back in the canyon and tears pricked his eyes. He forced them back. “N-not really.”

“I thought…” Dawn sniffed herself and turned away, toward the other corpse. She rolled her over with a hoof and stared down at her barding. “I thought if I found a ton of Med-X, more than all of Appleloosa needed for years, then she'd take some. And maybe Candi—and Shea's last days would be easier.”

Now the tears fell free, and Phoenix wiped them away desperately. “That's really…” he breathed. “Really kind of you.”

Dawn slammed a hoof down on the dead mare's chest. A burble of blood gushed from the corpse's mouth.

“Yeah,” Dawn muttered. “Yeah.” She spun around. “Find anything?”

He levitated the syringe into the air. “Just this.”

“Not good enough,” Dawn growled. She cross the cavern and snatched it with a hoof. “There should be more. They should have…” She glanced back and forth. “Look for a paper.”

“Huh?”

“There should be a scrap of paper around here with times and dates on it. Help me look for it.”

Phoenix nodded and complied. There were all sorts of papers scattered around. Some held makeshifts journals, some were covered in nearly incomprehensible poetry. One was just a long sum of numbers, like a kind of ledger.

“Found it.” Dawn said. She turned his way with a torn scrap of paper balanced on one hoof. “Shipment… no that's… ahah! Tonight!” She spun toward him and tossed the note his way. It fluttered in the air and plunged toward the fire, and he snatched it in his magic at the last second. “Four hours! We need to hurry!”

He looked at the note, near the bottom, by the day's date, and the time a few hours away.

Med-X shipment and misc.. Small party, long range.

That sat atop the highest hill nearby. Dawn had borrowed his rifle, and now she aimed it with both hooves and her mouth across the desert. It looked as awkward as one would expect.

“Are you sure you don't want me to do it?” he offered.

“Hmmghmmm,” Dawn mumbled past the grip.

He wrinkled his muzzle. “I'll take that as a no?”

She nodded minutely.

“Okay.” He sat back on his haunches and waited for the sun to set. Already the clouds were painted red and brown by the descending light. His saddlebags slumped off his back and slid to the ground, and, after minutes of staring off into the dead horizon, he reached a hoof inside and retrieved the healing potion he'd found in the cave.

“How's your side?” he asked.

Dawn shrugged without taking her eyes off the wasteland before them, or her mouth off the trigger.

Phoenix carefully stood up and circled around behind her, moving his hooves slowly and noiselessly, until he finally had an unobstructed view of her injured side. He sucked in his breath.

From hip to shoulder, her grey barding was stained almost black, and streaks ran down her legs on either side. That was too much blood.

Dawn shifted and flicked an ear.

He took a step closer and peered at the wound. The orange light from his telekinesis glinted off of something deep within her flesh.

His stomach sank. “Dawn! You have a bullet in you!”

She dropped the gun and whirled toward him, bending a foreleg to shield her barrel from sight. “Would you just forget it already? I don't need—” Her eyes landed on the potion floating beside him. “Where did you get that?”

“In the cave. When I was looking for Med-X.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Why… why didn't you give it to me then?”

“You seemed really angry. I didn't want to upset you.”

She held out a hoof, frog toward the sky, and shot him an expectant look.

“Don't we… uh… We need to get the bullet out first.”

She glared, and he gave her the potion. She upended it in one motion, then tossed the empty vial aside.

“Better?” Phoenix asked, squinting past her raised leg.

She snorted and turned back to the overlook, but he saw her breathing ease and her limbs relax. “Thanks,” she muttered.

He settled back down at her side and gazed across the desert. “You're welcome.”

“No need to be smug about it,” she said.

“Huh? But I just meant—”

“Sorry. I'm sorry.” Dawn sighed and stretched her neck. “I'm just really tense and… I'm sorry I've been so shitty today. And yesterday.” She settled onto her stomach, the rifle within easy reach. “You're good at this. Better than I was at your age.”

“At killing ponies?”

Dawn flinched. “I mean… yeah. That. But also everything else. You must have followed me for hours before we got to that canyon, and I didn't have a clue.”

“You were distracted, I guess.” He paused. “Thanks.”

“You're welcome,” she said, echoing his exact inflection moments ago, then stuck out her tongue.

He almost laughed.

Time passed. The shadows lengthened. The sky dimmed.

“Hey, uh…” He licked his lips. “Who were those ponies in the cave? I mean, they shot at us right away, so I guess they were assholes anyway—”

“Language,” Dawn chided.

He waved a hoof. “Yeah, yeah. But seriously, how did you know they'd be there? And about the note?”

Dawn rolled her eyes. “I suppose it's nothing worth hiding. They're slavers. Part of Old Appleloosa's supply network. I was scavenging in the mountains and accidentally crossed one of their caravans. They were on their way back, so there was nothing to loot, but they also had a schedule or something. Dates that other caravans were coming in, and the stuff they'd be carrying.” She looked back out toward the setting sun. “Today's their biggest Med-X delivery for weeks.”

Phoenix digested that for a moment. “So we're taking medicine that's meant for slaves? Isn't that kinda… fucked up?”

“Don't be a moron. It's for the slavers. Or it's to keep the slaves from passing out from pain, so they can keep working. Or something. I dunno. But isn't anything that makes life harder for slavers a good thing?”

He shrugged. “I guess so.”

“We'll take all that medicine back to New Appleloosa and use it to actually help ponies.” Dawn's head tilted back slightly, and she stared off into the horizon. “We'll be heroes.”

“To Candi,” Phoenix said quietly.

A small smile crossed Dawn's face. “Yeah.”

Heroes. Maybe they were. He thought of his pellet gun, lying abandoned in the canyon, surrounded by corpses. He thought about the battered submachine gun in his bags, taken from one bandit to kill another, and to save his sister. He thought about the functional, deadly rifle in front of them. He wasn't sure how to feel about that gun.

“Sure you don't want me to hold that?” he asked, gesturing for the rifle.

Dawn opened her mouth, then her face twisted. “You know what? You're a good shot. Maybe better than me at this range.” She slid it his way.

He levitated the gun into the air, checked the clip and the action, then brought it to his face. The ironsights were sharp and clear. Point and shoot. He aimed at a rock, then a little higher to account for the distance. That seemed about right.

“You do look older,” Dawn commented. “And not just cause you're holding a big boy gun.”

He grunted. “I kinda feel older.”

Maybe killing was just part of growing up.

A dust cloud gathered at the edge of the world. It moved steadily closer, growing in size and definition. Dawn fell still beside him. He held the rifle close and sighted the object as it approached.

“This is it,” Dawn whispered, nervous and excited. Her limbs shivered.

Two ponies came into view first, their limbs a blur of dust and motion. Minutes later, the caravan they dragged behind became clear.

Dawn squinted. “Just two?”

“I think there's a few behind the caravan,” Phoenix said between breaths.

A minute dragged by, then another.

“Whenever you're ready,” Dawn said. She reached back and drew her pistol.

The rifle sights hovered just above the leftmost pony. Phoenix counted his breaths until he could distinguish the pony's head.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

His breathing stopped entirely, and he fired.

Everything froze for a moment. The rifle kicked against his magic and bumped his shoulder. Dawn started forward, down the path from their semi-hidden perch and toward the empty plain.

Then the pony dropped to the ground. Phoenix held them in his sights for a moment, but they didn't so much as twitch.

Dawn was gone, already racing across no pony's land.

Phoenix turned toward the second lead pony. Only a few degrees away, really. He took a second to line up the shot. It was harder this time. The second pony was ducking and crawling toward their downed companion. It was harder, but not by much.

He fired.

The second pony stopped moving.

Dawn appeared at the bottom of his vision, an indistinguishable mess of dust and pounding limbs. She'd be on the caravan within seconds. He raised the rifle again, toward the back of the caravan. There had to be more. One heartbeat. Two.

Not a hint of movement, other than Dawn's frantic shape.

“Huh.”

Phoenix gathered his bags, slipped the rifle through the straps, and hurried after his sister.

He caught up with Dawn quickly. His legs were longer than hers.

She shot him a frustrated look when he drew level with her, but her mouth was filled with a pistol, so he was spared a rebuke.

It wasn't easy, but he managed to unzip his saddlebags and withdraw his submachine gun without breaking stride.

Several hundred feet of desert stretched before them, but ponies were built to run. Long before Phoenix had mentally prepared himself, the caravan loomed before them.

Dawn broke off and circled to the right, barely slowing. She disappeared behind the vehicle.

Two lumps of pastel pony meat lay before the caravan, victims of his practiced aim. He shivered, then followed his sister's example and circled to the left, submachine gun extended, ready to kill another slaver.

That's right. They were slavers. That meant they enslaved other ponies. All of these guys had probably killed and raped and abused hundreds of others. That buoyed him a little.

A gunshot rang out, and he leapt around the corner, his magic tense on the submachine gun's trigger. Dawn stood over another body. A mare, naked except for a neckerchief. Come to think of it, the two drivers had been unarmoured as well.

Dawn reared onto her hind legs, grabbed the caravan's rear door between her front hooves, and ripped it open. He was still surprised by how strong she still was, despite everything. But then, why would being a mare make her muscles any less potent or scary?

She retreated away from the open door, probably anticipating gunshots. There were none. The caravan was empty.

Phoenix released a shaky breath and grinned at her. He stepped forward, around the corner and into the doorway.

Something slammed into his chest, hard enough to leave him breathless. His hooves tangled, his head spun, and then the world spun as well. His back hit the ground. Between gasps of air and static in his ears, he heard another volley of gunshots, the familiar crack of Dawn's pistol, then silence.

He finally managed to fill his lungs. He continued to inhale greedily in an attempt to dispell the ache in his chest. Luna, but it stung.

“Ph-Phoenix?” Dawn's face loomed over him. Her hoof touched his chest nervously. “Are you…”

“Fah… fine,” he managed. “Are we… did we do it?” He tried to sit up.

“Woah! Hold on.” Dawn pressed a hoof against his forehead, keeping him supine. “I think you got shot.” She peered closer at his torso.

“Just winded,” he said. He was already starting to recover, despite a few bruises. He pushed her hoof away and rolled to his hooves. He barely swayed. “See?”

Dawn shook her head. “Lucky bastard,” she said with a chuckle. “One day you're gonna get shot for real, and you won't have a clue how to deal with it.”

Together, they looked into the caravan. It was piled high with crates, and with just one glance it was clear what they contained. Layer upon layer of carefully packed syringes.

Dawn made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a hiccup. “Fucking finally.”

She slid the nearest crate onto her shoulders and carried it out to the open air, then started carefully transfering syringe after syringe into her bag. “Come on, help me. We need to carry as much of this as we can back to town.”

Phoenix nodded, and on shaky limbs he climbed into the caravan, his horn already glowing.

At the back of the vehicle, huddled behind crates and within shadows, lay a small pony. Smaller than either of them. A gun lay just beside the body. He levitated it into the air and looked it over. Over the course of two days, Phoenix had become something of an expert in scavenging guns, in his opinion. He released the clip and glanced inside.

Rubber bullets. So that's what had hit him. After everything that had just happened, it barely registered. Then he looked over at the body, and it hit him a bit harder. Not a young adult or an older teenager, but a kid. Younger than him. Armed with only a toy gun. Why would a kid be travelling with slavers? Something was wrong.

“Dawn?”

“Hmm?” His sister raised her head from her task. “What's up?”

He looked around the inside of the caravan. Tiny bottles of dried spices. Blankets. There was a small pile of books, a board game. A map. He unfolded it and looked close. Routes were staked out up and down Equestria, from Friendship City to Tenpony to New Appleloosa. The route skirted far away from the slaver city.

He looked up at his sister. “This is a merchant caravan.”

Dawn shook her head. “They're slavers.”

He floated the map over to her, and she grabbed it with both hooves. Her brow furrowed. “But… the slavers… the note…” she said tensely.

“We just raided a caravan.”

Dawn shook her head again, more vigorously. “They're slavers. Or they're working with slavers, which is basically just as bad.” She waved a hoof. “Can't you just enjoy a win for once? We did it!”

“Working with slavers?” he mumbled. “Just like everypony in New Appleloosa?”

Her eyes narrowed, and all good humour drained from her eyes. “Shut the fuck up and start loading drugs, Phoenix.” She turned and began to sort through a crate, her tail whipping in tight, restrained thrashes. “Just when I thought you'd grown up a bit.”

So he put the map away and dragged a stack of crates out. Just like the note had suggested, almost every crate was packed with medical supplies. He took everything out of his bag except his two guns, then carefully stowed syringe after syringe. Nearly a hundred doses in his bag alone, he reckoned. Dawn did the same, and her bags were even bigger. New Appleloosa might never need to buy painkillers again.

The last of the day's light fled behind the horizon, and soon the grey ceiling far above darkened to black.

Phoenix surpressed a yawn.

Dawn noticed. “We need to sleep,” she said. “Let's drag the corpses out into the desert a bit, and then we can use the caravan.”

He shivered, but already the bodies were starting to seem less like ponies and more like piles of meat. He telekinetically grabbed a leg and pulled. Dawn crawled in behind and pushed. It took both of them nearly twenty minutes to move all four corpses out of sight of the caravan. Phoenix's entire body crawled as they walked away from the impromptu grave they'd chosen, and he almost wished he'd used his hooves or even his mouth instead of his magic. Something deep inside felt dirty, and he wasn't sure how to clean it, or if it could be cleaned. Dawn didn't seem bothered though, so he tried his best to ignore it.

“You know that we can't tell Mom and Dad, right?” Dawn said as she prepared a fire. “They'd kick my ass for doing something like this under normal circumstances. With you here too… I'm pretty sure they'd lock us both in our rooms for decades.”

“Probably.” Phoenix stared into the fire, following the valleys and peaks and letting the light burn into his retinas. “What should we say?”

Dawn appraised him again. She'd been doing that a lot, and it was starting to weird him out. “Something that makes it both of our faults, a little. Now hear me out…” she trailed off, expecting resistance. When she met none, she awkwardly continued, “Uh, no matter what we say, they'll pick one of us to blame for not coming home sooner. Either you for being reckless, me for being irresponsible, or something. But if we can spin it so we were… I dunno, looking out for each other…”

He could imagine it. Their parents would be pissed, but they'd also be relieved. Mom and Dad were also both dumb as rocks. If he and Dawn could convince them that they were just being generous and loyal and whatever, maybe relief would win out over the pissed-off-edness.

“You were attacked by bandits…” he began to suggest, then thought better of it. “No, one bandit. And you took them out before I got there.”

“Still too much.” Dawn tapped a hoof against the floor of the caravan. “They don't know that I… well… technically I'm not supposed to go much further from town than you are.”

Phoenix jerked upright. “Wait, seriously? So I've been covering for you this whole time?”

“Does it count as 'covering' if you didn't know you were doing it?” Dawn said with a grin. She cleared her throat. “Anyway, it's gotta be something weirder than that. Maybe you just thought I was in trouble?” She frowned. “No, that's… that's nothing.”

One of the pitiful pieces of wood in the fire splintered and cracked, and a cascade of smoke billowed out, filling the air with a dirty haze.

“We've still gotta walk all the way back,” Phoenix said. “Can we just sleep for now, and think while we're on the road?”

Dawn didn't reply. Phoenix rolled over and tried to pretend he was alone.

And the desert night was lonely.

They rested on a hill just outside New Appleloosa. Their venture out into the wastes had taken nearly two days. The return trip took just a few hours. To be fair, there were fewer gunfights on the way back. And there was also a lot less talking.

“They might not even be in town,” Phoenix said. “They're probably out looking for us.”

“One of them would stay. In case we come home.”

Shit. There went that hope. “Any ideas?”

Dawn sighed. “Yeah.” She gestured to her side, where she'd been shot. “We'll say I was hurt and you came looking for me. I still have the mark to show for it.” She grimaced. “Although we'll have to explain the potion.”

“And why we're loaded with Med-X,” Phoenix added.

She shook her head. “Nope. I'm taking it all to the clinic first thing. Walking around town with a bag full of drugs isn't a good idea, and we definitely don't want Mom or Dad to find out.”

“Good point.”

“You go straight home. Try not to talk too much. Just say that you were trying to help me and that I'm at the clinic, but I'm not too bad off.” She considered for a moment. “That sounds… normal, right?”

“Nothing about this is normal, but… yeah.”

“Look, worst case, they ground us.” She shrugged. “And it's not like we ever do what they tell us to anyway.”

Phoenix chuckled. “I guess not. Weird to hear you say it though. I've always thought you were a total narc, you know?”

Dawn shifted away. “Usually I kind of am. I just don't want to piss them off more than I have to. They put up with a lot.”

“Don't be dumb, Dawn. You're their favourite. Probably always will be.”

She looked out into the desert. “You say that, but you're the only one who calls me Dawn.”

“That's not true. They just forget sometimes.” Phoenix couldn't believe he was defending their parents, and to Dawn no less. “They're not bad ponies, they're just kind of…”

“Ditzy?” Dawn sugggested, a slight grin on her face.

“Pfft, yes. That exactly. Hey, speaking of Ditzy—”

“We weren't, actually.”

“How much do you think she'd offer us for all this Med-X?”

Dawn glared at him, and he raised his front hooves.

She rolled her eyes. “I doubt she could afford to buy this much. I doubt anypony in town could. This is… it's a lot. A few thousand caps at least.”

“Woah.”

“So unless we have some really wealthy addicts in Appleloosa, that's basically a non-starter. 'Sides, Candi needs it.”

“You mean Shea.”

Dawn stood up and started into town. “Yeah, her. Come on.”

On stiff legs they made their way toward the distant town. Phoenix paused every few minutes to run a hoof along his new rifle. He didn't hate it, and it fired real bullets, so the trip hadn't been a total waste. With luck, his parents wouldn't even notice that it was different from his old toy.

They passed the raider camp he'd been searching two days prior. Somepony had since come through and finished the job, leaving tossed and naked corpses in their wake. Maybe one of his parents. He thought back, trying to remember if he'd left any trace in the camp, anything that could mark the start of his trail. He couldn't. For some reason, he couldn't remember a single detail of that day, other than the canyon. He remembered the canyon perfectly.

New Appleloosa loomed on the horizon. As always, Phoenix kept his face neutral.

He glanced sidelong at Dawn, and saw the same expression on her face. They shared a silent nod. No matter their purpose, and no matter their experiences, the town didn't quite feel like home anymore. Not quite. It was weird to finally share something with Dawn, but he treasured it nonetheless.

They passed through the gates, and Dawn split off with the bags and the Med-X.

Phoenix turned, naked apart from his rifle, and faced Appleloosa's central road.

He walked toward his house and his parents, and prepared for the conversation ahead.

Didja miss us? he'd ask…

Yeah, that sounded good.

Author's Note

Thanks to Chaotic Dreams for pre-reading.

Gallows Humour

Lucky Bit always kept a loaded revolver on his wall, next to the liquor. For the day he couldn't afford another glass, he'd joke. But usually, he drank at Bram's Dram, where the booze never ran out.

There weren't many attractions in New Appleloosa, so the town's only tavern was always lively. Ponies of all stripes crowded around the bar, sipped at the establishment's unique homebrews, and raised their voices in cheer, revelry, and sorrow, like a scene from an old song. The tavern's proprietor, Bram, set a pair of mismatched bottles on the counter and tapped a hoof.

“On my tab, Bram,” Lucky said. He ripped the plastic film from the bottle's neck and drank deeply.

Bram looked around. “Where's Hook? I assume that one's for her?” he said, pointing at the second, unopened bottle.

“Went to take a leak.” Lucky took a another sip. “We should ride Railright's ass more, get some proper toilets. I hate lumbering out into the wastes every time I gotta drain the tank.”

“You'd piss less if you drank less,” Bram said with a laugh. “'Sides, priority's probably power and clean water first. So hold it or get walkin'.”

Lucky finished the bottle and slid it toward Bram, then eyed the second bottle with care. “Or I could just do it out back.”

The other stallion glared. “I don't care how much money you toss in my lap. You piss in my backyard, I'll ban you.”

The mare on the seat next to Lucky leaned over. “Did you say she went out there alone?” she asked. “At night? Aren't you worried about slavers?”

“No.” He raised an eyebrow, then, without looking, reached over and unsealed the second bottle. “They wouldn't come this close to town, and they'd never be able to catch her anyway. Not a thing alive can outrun Hook.”

“They've been getting bolder. And busier. Seems like they're snatching every pony that passes by now, and they're shipping them out by the train-load.”

Lucky grunted, and through a mouthful of beer said, “You seem to know a lot about them. They lining your pockets or something?”

That ended the conversation. In New Appleloosa, slavery was a touchy subject. Nopony liked it, but nopony fought it. Landing on either side of the issue was inviting trouble.

He finished his drink and ordered another. His senses dulled and time slipped by as he waited for his partner to return. Lucky had no aversion to drinking alone, but it could be boring. Bram wasn't the sort of bartender who kept up conversations, not even the paltry half-conversations that always buzzed in the tavern's background.

Soon the evening crowd thinned. The bar was wiped down, glasses were collected and submerged.

“Last call, Lucky.” Bram sounded apologetic.

Lucky shook his head and raised his near-empty glass high. “Hookline's not afraid of a few slavers. They could never catch her. Nothing could ever catch her.”

Bram nodded and waited patiently for Lucky to finish his last mouthful, then swept the glass behind the counter.

“I bet she's waiting for me at home. Probably finished most of the liquor. Hah. Probably passed out in bed already.”

“You know her best, I suppose.”

Lucky tapped a hoof on the bar.

“One more for good luck?” Bram asked.

The town was dark and quiet when Lucky finally staggered home. He fumbled with the lock, cursing his cotton-stuffed head and clumsy hooves. He sank into bed, alone, and stared at the ceiling. The walls spun.

It wasn't long before the fitful sleep of the drunk and terrified found him.

Mornings weren't Lucky's thing, but the next day he rose before dawn. His head thundered and bile stained his mouth, but he moved with purpose. He scanned the room and found himself alone. Still alone.

He retrieved a faded coat that lay crumpled in one corner of the room and shrugged it on. From its place above the liquor cabinet, he grabbed the revolver. It had lived there, mounted on the wall, since the day he and Hookline moved into town. New Appleloosa wasn't dangerous like the wasteland at large, so it had been relegated to a wall ornament, a conversation piece. The setup to a dark joke. Lucky didn't even own a holster or belt to carry it in, so he walked out the door with the revolver clutched awkwardly between his teeth.

He attracted more stares with each passing minute. Weapons were a common sight on the streets of New Appleloosa, but Lucky's stride, the determination in his eyes, and the inches between his tongue and the trigger drew notice. Murmurs swept through the town with such speed that by the time he reached the gates, the sentries were expecting him. Lucky nodded to them as he passed. They flinched as the barrel in his mouth slid past them.

“Wait!” shouted somepony down the street.

Lucky kept walking. He couldn't afford to waste another minute. Hookline could already be gone.

“Son of a bitch, hold it for a second.” Hooves pounded through the gate and slowed to a canter.

“Don't you have a bar to wipe down?” Lucky said without stopping.

Bram ran up beside him and matched his pace. He struggled to catch his breath. “You're going to Appleloosa,” he said.

Lucky growled past the gun metal. “Don't make me shoot you, Bram. I don't have many bullets with me.”

“Not gonna stop you. The opposite, really. Seem like you could use some company.”

He slipped the revolver into a pocket of his coat. “I'm flattered, but no thanks. I've never had much interest in cock anyway.”

Bram flinched, but he didn't stop moving.

They walked in silence by the train tracks, their eyes on the road ahead. This part of Equestria had always been a wasteland, an empty desert, long before the first bomb fell. Apart from an uneven blanket of magical radiation, it was mostly unchanged. The air was bone dry and furnace hot. It sucked the moisture from between Lucky's teeth and left his mouth and throat burning. It was still morning; the day's heat had only just begun.

“What's the plan?” Bram asked.

“I'm going to find Hook.”

“And?”

“And we'll all head back to the Dram and have a few.”

“Not much of a plan,” Bram remarked.

Lucky fixed his coat, where the weight of the revolver had shifted it askew.

“No,” he agreed.

It was past mid-day, and they were near the mountain's summit. Both stallions were starting to struggle, but Lucky kept his pace, and Bram followed a step or two behind.

“Didn't pack any water, huh?” Bram said between laboured breaths.

Lucky winced. It felt like his throat had been turned inside out. “I was in a hurry.”

“I get that. Still, charging out into the desert without any supplies is pretty stupid.”

“And yet here we both are,” Lucky said. “You're welcome to turn back. You could be there by happy hour, if you hurry.”

Bram was silent for a moment. “If you and Hook die, I might as well shut down. You're half my business, most days.”

A dozen silent steps dragged by.

“You ever been to Old Appleloosa?” Bram asked.

“Yeah, once. Hook and I found an old storehouse full of manabatteries. Looked like they hadn't been touched since the war. Red Eye offered us the best price around.” He coughed, then shuddered as the motion tore at his throat. “It's a shithole, but it's better than Fillydelphia.”

“An entire storehouse? No wonder you two are loaded.”

“Well, we've been trying to convert it to all to booze, one bottle at a time, but it's been slow. You should raise your prices or something.”

The ground finally leveled off, and the world fell away in front of them. Bram lumbered up beside Lucky and rested a hoof on his shoulder. “We should take a minute. I'm about to keel over.”

They settled down on a stretch of flat earth, away from the train tracks. Bram dropped to his stomach and began a series of slow stretches. Lucky withdrew the revolver from his coat pocket. He turned it over, opened the cylinder, and popped a bullet free, then snapped the gun closed.

Bram stopped stretching and watched, tense.

Lucky aimed to the sky and pulled the trigger twice, nodding at the crisp cracks of the hammer, the smooth rotation of the cylinder. He opened the gun again and inspected the bullet from all angles, slid it back inside, and carefully rotated it into position.

“Ever fired that thing before?” Bram asked.

Lucky shook his head. “Never needed to. I hide, Hook runs. Neither of us shoots.” The polished silver barrel glowed in the muted sunlight. “But I knew that one day I'd need it.”

Bram cracked a grin. “For the day you can't afford another glass,” he recited. “I always figured it was fake. Just for display, you know. But I guess those are hard to come by compared to the real thing.”

Lucky stowed the gun and rolled his shoulders. He scanned the horizon and peered down the hill before them. Soon they'd have to resume their trek, or they wouldn't get there before dawn. He rose, and Bram followed suit.

They were less than a hundred yards down the mountain when the sound of groaning wheels, pounding hooves, and grinding steel billowed over the summit. The two stallions spun and crouched, ready to dive for cover. Seconds later, a giant blur rushed past them in a blast of air and sound, and they were both left stunned and reeling.

Lucky stumbled toward his companion. “Train,” he muttered.

Bram growled. “Bastards couldn't stop and offer us a ride? They must have seen us on the way up.”

The speeding shape grew smaller and smaller as it careened down the slope. It would be at the slaver town within the hour.

Lucky prayed that it was just a shipment from New Appleloosa, some dried meat or cases of booze. If slaves were sent on to Fillydelphia by rail, they would have no hope of catching up.

Wind blew around them and raised a vortex of dust. It ripped at the ends of Lucky's coat. He snagged one side with his hoof, drawing the revolver close to his body.

He set his shoulders and walked.

Lucky slowed to a trot when the town came into view. He looked to both sides of the path, then veered off to the east. Bram followed without comment.

“They'll have lookouts facing the tracks,” Lucky explained. “It'll be easier to sneak in from the other side.”

The earth beneath Bram's hoof gave way, and he skidded several feet down the incline. “So there is a plan.”

“No, but I think intentionally charging into machine gun fire crosses the line between 'suicide mission' and 'suicide attempt'.”

They picked their way down the mountain, slowly at first, but they found a rhythm before long.

The sky's light dimmed quickly, and the air cooled. The stallions' gasps and grimaces subsided and were replaced by squints and curses as their hooves tripped over dark and uneven ground. The same distance they covered in a matter of hours earlier in the day took them half the night, but finally they reached the base of the mountain, and two hours later they crouched just beyond shooting range of the town's rear.

“So we just… walk in?” Bram asked.

“Not exactly. Move slow, keep your head down, and watch your step.” He paused. “Oh, and if someone starts shooting at you, think happy thoughts, cause they'll probably be your last.”

He started forward, and after a moment's hesitation, Bram trailed behind.

“I don't suppose I could convince you to let this one go? Plenty of fish in the sea and all?”

Lucky sighed. “Bit late for that now. We're already here, and I don't think we'll make it back without something to drink.” He felt the weight in his coat pocket. “Besides, I've done all the dramatic build-up. It would look pathetic if I backed down now.”

“Good a reason to throw yourself on the fire as any, I guess.”

The east-facing side of Old Appleloosa was a solid black wall at night—one large, blocky, misshapen shadow. Forty feet from the buildings, Lucky froze and squinted at the ground ahead. Large divots, most around four feet deep, were scattered at random intervals. “Stop,” he hissed, and pricked his ears. Silence, and then, a low moan from the edge of the town.

Lucky's mouth formed a tight line. “Minefield.” His gaze wandered up and down the town's perimeter.

“Hah.” Bram planted his hooves and gestured forward. “This wasn't in the plan.”

“Nothing was in the plan. There was no plan.” Lucky winced, then took a step forward. When he didn't explode, he stepped forward again. “I think I can… see them. Hold on.” Behind him, Bram backed away.

Hoof by hoof, and inch by inch, Lucky worked his way toward the town. There were a few close calls, where the ground gave way and tossed dirt across the surface of a mine, or when he came to one explosive that disrupted the regular pattern, and his hoof landed only millimeters from the pressure pad. Minutes that felt like hours later, he took a final step and relaxed. The terrain ahead was smooth and undisturbed. He turned and waved. Bram muttered a quiet curse, then followed in his steps.

The moan rose again, more subdued than before, and strained, as if its source was trying to keep quiet. Lucky turned toward it. The moan came a third time, and Lucky approached cautiously. An indistinguishable lump lay on the edge of a crater.

Hope rose in his chest, and he did his best to stamp it out.

“Hello?” Lucky whispered. The lump didn't respond, and he moved closer. He reached out and gave it a soft prod, and was answered by a raspy hiss.

The shape shuddered, and in a choked, rattling voice, said, “Kill me… or… fuck off.”

Every time the lump moved, Lucky could distinguish more of its anatomy. No horn. Not Hookline. An earth pony, missing three legs and most of her pelt. His stomach lurched, and he jerked away. “How… what happened?”

“Mines.” Each word was a horrible production, wrought from gasps and clicks and coughs. “Minefield.”

“I saw.”

“Who… are…?”

“Just a passing barfly.” Lucky glanced up. Bram had only passed the first two rows of mines. He would be waiting a while longer. “Does it hurt?”

A blood-filled cough. “Like a bitch. Med-X?”

“Sorry, I don't have anything like that.” He felt the weight of the revolver in his coat. “I have a gun.”

“Spare a bullet?”

Lucky withdrew the weapon and checked the cylinder. His throat tightened. “Okay. You'll just have to owe me one.”

“What?” The mare looked up at him, a faint pool of light on one side of her face and concealing darkness on the other.

Lucky shook his head. “A joke. Sorry.” He bit down on the grip and aimed. His teeth chattered, and he moved in closer, until the barrel was inches from her skull.

“Thank you.”

He thought of the sound the gunshot would make. It would alert anyone within a mile, probably bring the whole town running. Bram was dancing between mines. If he was startled…

“Thank you,” the mare said again. She closed her only eye.

He pulled the trigger. Blood splashed over his face and the tips of his hooves.

Far away, Bram shouted something in alarm, but there was no second explosion. Lucky glanced at the revolver and imagined the white smoke pouring from the its barrel. He was tempted to open the cylinder, to check that the bullet had really fired, but they had to move. The gun returned to his pocket, and its weight was suddenly less than a feather.

The piercing ringing in Lucky's ears faded into the lower, deeper thrum of absolute, perfect silence.

For an unknowable time, they hid on the edge of town, not twenty paces from the minefield. The town remaned silent and motionless, just as dead as the mare beside them. When the first hints of dawn peeked over the horizon, Lucky finally shifted. “Nopony's coming. Let's go,” he said. The day continued to take its toll, now in fatigue and exhaustion, and their hooves slid gracelessly through the dirt into town.

The pre-war town was grim and downtrodden compared to New Appleloosa. The box cars and scrap metal cages that made up half the buildings fought with the ancient wooden structures beside them. It looked more like a junkyard than a place where ponies lived. A liminal space, a crossroads, where slaves were stored before their destinations were determined and they were shipped away to be used.

The faint light painted the town in frigid shades of blue and white, which gave the blood puddles and corpses a kind of ghostly glow.

They both froze mid-step at the sight. Lucky waded into the massacre, his eyes wide and his jaw clenched tight. The dried blood on his hooves crunched and flaked against the red soil. Dozens of bodies, all armed, all dead. The revolver in his coat felt lighter than ever.

Bram walked up beside him. “What the fuck could do this? Raiders?”

“I… I don't—” Lucky shook himself. “No. Not raiders. Look, the bodies haven't been touched, not even their guns. And…” He turned to take in the whole town, each nook and cranny. “It's too quiet. Nopony's here at all. No slavers, no slaves.”

“Think somepony took them?”

“None of these guys look like slaves to me,” Lucky said. He moved closer to one of the bodies and suppressed the urge to gag. “Let's split up and look around.”

“You just said there's nopony here. We should just—”

“Nothing alive, but… If she's dead, I'd like to find her body. Just to know, you know?”

Bram stared at him for a long moment, searching for something in Lucky's eyes. “Yeah, I know.”

Checking the dead became harder for Lucky with each new corpse. Each time he would find a unicorn, his heart would freeze, and was certain that he'd see Hookline's face when he rolled the body over. When, each time, it wasn't her, his heart would freeze just the same, and he would be certain that he'd never find her, never learn what happened, never see her face again. That would be so much harder.

He met up with Bram at the train platform. The stallion greeted him with a silent wave. They sat and stared out across the desert, to the tracks that ran across it and up the mountain, and at the tiny dot trundling along them. “I guess we're not done yet,” Bram said.

Lucky shrugged. The train would pass New Appleloosa in a few hours, and after that, it could go anywhere. “We can't catch up to it.”

Bram shifted and lifted something from the floor beside him. A pair of glass bottles. He offered one to Lucky. “Found some beer. I think it's beer.”

“You would know.” Lucky accepted the bottle, popped the lid, and took a big gulp. He gagged. “Think it's gone off.”

Bram sipped, grimaced, and shook his head. “It's beer. Beer doesn't go off.”

Lucky chuckled and downed the rest of the beer in one go. He tossed it, and the glass shattered against the rail tracks. Bram reached down again, and the telltale hissing of a radio flickered to life. An old, familiar song lurched into the air.

Miles away, the train car disappeared over the mountain's summit.

“If you were caught by slavers, what would you do?” Lucky asked.

Bram squirmed, and after only a moments hesitation, swigged from his beer. “Escape.”

“And if you couldn't? If you couldn't open your cage, or they put one of those fucking bomb collars on you. What then?”

“I'd wait until I could escape. Until I could figure something out, or until somepony else came to help me.” Another sip. “What would you do?”

A small smile played across Lucky's face. “Pop myself in the head, first chance I got.” He fidgeted with his coat pocket. “Life's shitty enough as is. Being a slave… that definitely pushes it over the line.”

Bram turned, and set down his beer, and gave Lucky his full attention. Slowly, thoughtfully, he said, “Seems like suicide's your answer to everything.”

“Hah. Yeah, well… It's a pretty versatile solution. Not much it doesn't solve.”

“Got its downsides though.” The music reached a crescendo in the background. Bram reached out and lowered the volume. “Is that why you shot that mare?”

“She wanted me to shoot her.” Bram opened his mouth to reply, but Lucky interrupted him. “She knew it was a minefield. There are big warning signs on the edge of town, if you'd look. She just mistimed it, or the explosion wasn't quite big enough. She wanted me to finish the job. Better than being a slave.”

“Damn.” Bram took a slow, tense sip. “What about Hook? What would she do?”

Lucky's smile widened, but his eyes were wet. “Where'd you think I got the joke about the revolver? 'For the day we can't afford another glass.' She was always the witty one.”

Ray by ray, the sun rose. The song reached its final notes, and static filled the air.

“I saw inside the gun, back on the mountain. Only one bullet.”

Lucky popped open another beer.

“It's a big gun. One bullet's all it takes.”

Their journey home was slow and silent. They carried bottles of water found in Old Appleloosa, and they stopped to sleep atop the mountain, yet the walk was even less comfortable than before.

The sun was past its height when they reached the gates of New Appleloosa. Even from outside the walls, it was obvious that something had startled the town into motion.

“Something happen?” Bram asked one of the stallions by the gate.

The two sentries exchanged a look. “Seems like Calamity and the newcomer took our slaving friends by storm. Railright's had a hell of a time figuring out what to do with all the slaves. Former slaves.” He frowned.

“Refugees,” the other sentry offered.

Lucky was already advancing through the gate and into town. He wanted to break into a run, to relieve the horrible tightness in his chest that grew less bearable every second. But he didn't, because he also wanted to savour those last few minutes of hope. Bram moved at a trot to keep up.

Ponies cantered through the streets and buzzed between buildings, their backs laden with food, clothes, and items less explicable. Their hooves tossed dirt and sand into the air, lending the town a dusty red haze. Lucky wasn't an especially social stallion, but he knew most of the faces in New Appleloosa, and that day he saw a number of new ones. Scared, nervous, pained, and, above all, tired faces. Ponies who had survived their time in Appleloosa.

He turned to a passing pony, stopped them with a firm hoof. “Excuse me,” he said. He recognized the mare. She was often behind him in line at Ditzy's. “Have… have you seen Hook?”

She frowned. “Hook? Hookline? Um… no? Is she missing?”

“S-slavers.”

“Oh.” She looked around pensively. “I haven't see her. Maybe ask the others? Railright's got 'em in one of the old boxcars at the edge of town. If she was on the train, they can probably tell you.”

Lucky mumbled a thank you, and they started for the slums.

New Appleloosa looked like a proper town from most angles, even though the buildings were just repurposed train cars. In the slums, that illusion broke. Old cars were scattered, many upside down, dented, or sheared in half. Ponies never stayed there long.

They found the slaves in the first car on the lot, and they weren't welcomed. Ponies lay on the floor, wrapped in thin felt blankets and sipping lethargically at bottled water.

“You were all in Old Appleloosa?” Lucky asked. “Did any of you see a pink mare with a yellow mane? A gust of wind for a cutie mark?”

Blank stares answered him.

“Please. She's missing.”

An emaciated stallion near the boxcar's door shook his head. “They sent the last batch of slaves out a week ago. If she was kidnapped since then, she'd be here.”

“Are you sure?” Lucky stepped inside and looked for a familiar face. Ponies shifted toward the boxcar's walls, away from him. “Nopony died on the way back?”

“Just slavers.”

Lucky worked his jaw, trying to think of another question, when an older mare at the back of the car raised her voice.

“I saw her. On the way to Appleloosa, she was with me.” The mare's eyes were sad and sympathetic. “A couple of the meaner stallions took a liking to her. Last I saw, they dragged her away from the group. Heard some grunting, maybe a fight, then a gunshot. The stallions came back, but she didn't. Don't know why they'd kill a perfectly healthy mare like that.” She offered him a kind smile. “I'm terribly sorry for your loss.”

The confusing mix of emotions that had plagued Lucky since waking up alone the day before finally crystallized.

“Thank you,” he said. He hoped some of his money would find its way into these ponies' pockets. They deserved it more than he or Hook ever had.

The streets were just as busy and dusty as when they'd arrived, but to Lucky they seemed strangely serene.

“She could still be alive,” Bram said. “One bullet, would that really put her down?”

“If it was a big enough gun.”

They passed Lucky and Hook's home. Lucky didn't break his stride. Bram let out a sigh and fell back into step beside him.

At the Dram, Bram paused and caught Lucky's shoulder. “Come on. I've been closed for two days now, and I can hear my piggy bank squealing. Some of that manabattery money would be great right about now.” He pushed open the door.

Lucky shook his head. “Thanks, Bram, for everything. For being a friend. But I'll take a rain check tonight. I'm sure your piggy bank can survive one more day without my caps.” He clapped Bram on the back and continued down the street.

Alone for the first time in days, he let out a long, shallow sigh. His hooves trudged through the dirt, and his eyes rested on a building across town. More of a stall, really, but three of its walls were solid.

“Evenin',” said the proprietor when Lucky drew close. “What can I getcha?” He eyed Lucky's torso. “Think I've got a battle saddle that'll fit.”

“Just one bullet.” He rested the revolver on the counter. “Whatever type this takes.”

The stallion raised an eyebrow. “One bullet? I don't… not sure I even have 'em in singles.”

Lucky rummaged through the pocket of his coat and produced a hoofful of caps. “I'll pay extra if you have to break up a pack or something.”

The merchant swept the caps up and, after a quick search beneath the counter, dropped a bullet in their place. He licked his lips. “You, uh, doing okay?”

“I've been better,” Lucky said with a small smile. He thanked the stallion and left.

The sun was beginning to set when he stepped inside his home. It felt like a foreign place, like somepony else had been living there for weeks, or months. He dropped his coat in the corner and settled into a chair against one wall.

With great care, he loaded the revolver, spun the cylinder into place, drew back the hammer.

Something across the room caught his eye. The liquor cabinet, and the bare wall above it.

Lucky set the gun down and opened the cabinet. Empty bottles stood in neat rows, labels of all colours and designs. To one side stood an untouched sixth of dark liquor. How about that.

He grabbed the bottle, closed the cabinet, and fetched a glass. He sat back down, this time facing the door, and sipped. His throat burned, his chest glowed. Tears pricked at his eyes.

She had until he finished the bottle, Lucky thought. An hour or so, maybe a little less. Plenty of time for her to come home.

Until he couldn't afford another glass.