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.