Now that I had the opportunity to get a good up-close look, it was pretty clear to me that this floor had not seen a properly thorough cleaning in quite some time. I’d pretty much assumed that that was the case before now, but I’d never actually taken the time to get my face right down to the grimy concrete surface of the warehouse floor to confirm the assumption. Not that bringing my face this close for a look was something I’d planned on today. Or any day. However, if I was going to be down here anyway, I might as well avail myself to the opportunity.

Yep: it was filthy.

It was almost as though the long abandoned warehouse hadn’t seen the benefit of a janitor in years. Even back when it had seen consistent legitimate use, any custodian had almost certainly only done just enough cleaning to keep themselves from being fired. Why, even if this warehouse hadn’t been abandoned, I was willing to bet good gibbies that the bloodstains I was leaving behind here tonight wouldn’t have been touched by a mop any time soon, provided they were out of sight of where a supervisor typically inspected.

There generally wasn’t a lot of motivation to keep buildings in the ‘bad’ part of Haywood looking particularly pristine. This wasn’t exactly Aeriesaka Plaza where creatures cared about appearances more than function. Far from it. As a general rule, Haywood was the sort of neighborhood where creatures seemed to go out of their way to make it dirtier; leaving behind urine, feces, garbage…

…the beaten and bloodied bodies of ponies who’d screwed up one too many times.

I pushed that last thought out of my head almost as quickly as it formed. I wasn’t dying here. Not tonight. That wasn’t the plan. Not this time, at least. Next time something like this happened though…well, it might be a concern then. In the meantime…

I spit the rest of the blood that had been pooling in my mouth from my split lip and cheek onto the warehouse floor before wiping away at the frothy spittle on my chin with the back of my hoof. The whole left side of my face was still throbbing with pain from where I’d been kicked. My tongue lightly prodded at my teeth, taking a quick survey and looking for new gaps. Everything still seemed to be accounted for and in place, which was a little surprising honestly. Though I dreaded the thought of how the bruise would look by morning. I wasn’t nearly as good at using makeup to cover things like that up. My mother hadn’t lived long enough to teach me the tricks she’d used to hide the evidence of what Grinder’s goons used to do to her.

“Thank you, sir; can I have another?” I said almost reflexively as my smart mouth started moving before my brain had a chance to properly appraise my situation. The word ‘smart’ was admittedly doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Too late to take it back though. I cobbled together the best indifferent expression I could muster as I cast my gaze up at the crimson red stallion towering over me.

It was all I could do not to visibly wince. Both because my jaw hurt when I moved it to talk, and because I knew that it wasn’t the smartest thing to further antagonize a pony who had amply demonstrated that he wasn’t above inflicting excessive amounts of pain just to make a point. Unfortunately, sarcastic retorts were something of an instinctive defense mechanism for me. It was a habit I’d picked up fairly early on after being…let’s call it: ‘inducted’ into Grinder’s boosterherd. In this part of town, it was dangerous to let others see you as being ‘weak’. Being able to talk a big game was part of how one established that you weren’t somepony to be fucked with.

The other part was being able to actually back up your tough words with tough actions. I wasn’t very good at that part yet though. Which…was an unfortunate disparity in skillsets, if I was being honest. Still, in this specific situation, it wasn’t like being demure and groveling at his hooves was going to help me either. Grinder hated creatures like that just slightly more than he hated creatures who couldn’t get shit done.

Not that it was a whole lot safer to piss off tough ponies with bodycounts attached to their reputations. As was the case with the chromed-out earth pony who was currently looming over me. ‘Grinder’ wasn’t his real name, as far as I could tell; in the sense that it wasn’t what was written on his birth certificate. It was just what everypony in Haywood called him. Allegedly he’d earned the moniker as a result of what he was reported to do to creatures who got on his bad side one too many times.

I’d never seen him actually mulch anycreature. There were enough stories from other members of the herd about it though that I wasn’t inclined to doubt he’d done it a time or two in the past. That was what made it important to be able to back up those tough words I mentioned earlier with actions: if those actions were intimidating enough, you only had to demonstrate how tough you were once or twice before others got the hint. After that, you could coast through life on words alone. I wasn’t there yet though.

The smile on the towering red earth pony’s face was anything but warm. The crystalline nodule embedded in the crone of his skull flickered with an inner light. A second later, I found myself enveloped in a telekinetic field and hoisted roughly off of the ground. Before I had time to process that I was floating, my body jerked sharply backwards. I hit the side of the metal container behind me hard enough to leave a noticeable dent. My head throbbed where my skull had bounced off the container and my vision blurred slightly. A short message flashed before my eyes advising me that I should consider a visit a ChevalCareTM Clinic and showed a prompt which offered to plot a route to the nearest one.

I didn’t get the chance to dismiss the notification before a reinforced cybernetic hoof lashed out and punched me square in my exposed gut. I let out a gasping cry of pain and was unceremoniously released from Grinder’s telekinetic grasp. Yep; the floor was definitely filthy. I curled up protectively around my belly, coughing and hacking as my spasming lungs fought for breath. I’d probably earned that one…

“You can have as many as you’d like, Pel,” The stallion offered with a deep chuckle. I could hear some of his goons sniggering too. “Heck, you don’t even need to keep showing up here empty-hoofed to get treatment like this! Come by my place and I’ll smack you around for as long as you want.”

His expression shifted suddenly. Any sign of amusement in his golden eyes vanished in an instant and was entirely replaced with burning ire. He leaned his head down so that my whole field of view was taken up by those eyes. He wanted to make sure that he had my attention, and he very much did. I felt my chest grow tight as the look he gave me filled me with a sense of genuine fear for my life. “But show up without my money―all my money―again, and mark my words: the whomping I’ll lay down on you will be your last…

“Ya feel me, bloom?”

My throat suddenly felt very dry. For once in my life, no witty retort tried to force its way out through my lips. Which probably saved my life. Or, at the very least, spared me any further beatings tonight. I swallowed, trying to chase away my acute sudden-onset case of cottonmouth so I could voice my understanding, but it was to no avail. No words were able to struggle past the fear gripping my throat. So I simply nodded to indicate my agreement, which seemed enough to satisfy the larger stallion.

“Good.” Grinder straightened back up. “You have two days. If every gryphusbit I’m owed isn’t in my hoof by then, I’m breaking you down for scrap.” He jerked his head towards the warehouse’s door as a silent command to the rest of his entourage to follow after him and headed for the exit. The rest of the assembled creatures followed along in his wake, more than a few of them sparing a contemptuous look or two in the direction of the pitiful yellow unicorn mare still laying curled up on the filthy, blood-splattered, concrete floor.

When their hoofsteps had finally faded away into silence, I gasped out a breath that I hadn’t realized that I’d been holding. My lungs were burning, but they at least seemed to be working a lot better than they had after being bucked in the gut, my breathing coming off more as ragged pants than anything else. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, and hear my pulse thundering in my ears.

Fear. Anxiety. Dread. Everything that I kept bottled up and suppressed throughout my days and nights when anypony else was around was making an appearance. I curled in tighter on myself and squeezed my eyes shut as I fought to regain my composure. At least this abandoned warehouse afforded me privacy in this rare vulnerable moment.

It took a minute or two, but eventually I was able to get myself back under control and leveled out. Only then did I get back up onto my hooves. The jewel bonded at the base of my horn glowed as I summoned my own telekinesis to brush away the worst of the dirt and grime from my jacket. My face creased with concern for the state of the sleeveless leather vest that was older than I was. Given what I’d just been through, and the threat looming over my future wellbeing, it probably seemed a little silly to be so worried about a piece of clothing being dirty. However, the faded blue jacket was the most valuable possession I owned. Maybe not in terms of objective monetary value; but it was quite precious to me.

I was going to have to clean it properly, I decided after spying what looked like a stain of hydraulic fluid that I must have been lying in after Grinder’s first ‘disciplinary’ punch sent me to the ground. I’d been expecting the hit, but that hadn’t made much difference. The stallion’s limbs were more metal than meat. He punched like a pneumatic jackhammer. Almost literally. The only reason that I was even still alive was because he’d been holding back. The hits had just been a warning after all. My final warning, as it turned out.

Honestly, I’d kind of been expecting that too. This wasn’t the first time that I’d shown up with fewer gibbies than I was supposed to. I should probably count myself lucky that Grinder had given me as many chances as he had. I’d heard that there were plenty of herd leaders operating in Light City who weren’t anywhere near as accepting of failure as the earth pony had been. Maybe it was because I was as young as I was, and thus still plausibly ‘new’ enough to this kind of thing; and so an unspoken probationary period had been in effect to see if I could grow into the role I’d been assigned.

Or maybe he just wasn’t as eager to zero a young mare. Who could really say?

Whatever it was that had afforded me so much leeway up to this point though, I’d apparently just blown the last of my grace period in that regard. When I saw him again in two days, I’d either better bring his money, or a last will and testament. Not that I had any ‘next-of-kin’ to leave anything to.

…Not that I had anything to leave.

Hash Stack would get the last couple shirts hanging in my closet, I guess. She’d also have to find a new roommate too. And…that would be about all of the impact my death would have on the world: slightly increasing another pony’s wardrobe choices and necessitating a posting on the local bulletins about an available bed for rent on the cheap. And the latter was assuming that Hash didn’t already have somepony in her contacts who she knew was looking for a place.

I let out a heavy sigh and finally made my way out of the warehouse. My gait was stiff thanks to my still throbbing gut. Hopefully that would ease by morning. I paused briefly at the doorway and glanced around to make sure that one of Grinder’s goons hadn’t decided to hang back with the intention of further ‘motivating’ me to get right with the herd’s leader. Fortunately, the coast seemed to be clear; so I began making my way home.

The illusionary clock hovering in the upper right corner of my vision indicated that it was nearly one o’clock in the morning. You’d hardly have been able to tell that it was so late by how bright it was. Even this far from downtown, the glow from Light City made it feel like early morning at all hours of the night. The ‘Jewel of Equus’ was a city that never slept after all, and it showed. During the daylight hours, the metropolis’ more upstanding citizenry went about their lives, working the nine-to-five grind. When night fell and those creatures retired to their homes for the day, that was when the less reputable denizens, like myself, crawled out of their hovels and prowled the streets to make their own living on the fringe of society.

Which wasn’t to say that there weren’t creatures who led ‘proper’ lives at night. There were a few. I just wasn’t one of them, and my meager social circle didn’t include any either. Everycreature I knew had their hooves and/or talons into something that the LCPD would take exception to if they found out about it. This included myself. Extorting my neighbors for protection money on Grinder’s behalf was technically quite illegal, after all.

Not that I’d been very good at doing that. Hence the throbbing jaw and aching gut.

…And the looming threat against my life; can’t forget about that!

The familiar jingle of a clairaudience spell sounded in my ear, accompanied by the alert of an incoming call in the corner of my vision. A smile tugged at the edge of my lips when I saw that it was Hash Stack on the other end of the spell. The little pegasus knew perfectly well where I’d been going tonight, and what the purpose had been. She’d also known that my meeting wasn’t going to go as smoothly as it could have. She was probably checking to see if she got a response at all, or if she would need to post about that new vacancy Grinder was soon going to be opening up for her.

I accepted the call. “Hey, Hash.”

“Holy shit; you’re alive!” The mare’s squeaky voice exclaimed with no small amount of shock.

“Your lack of faith in me hurts, bloomba,” I forced a smile onto my face as I affected a bravado that I didn’t feel. Unlike with boosterherds, this time it wasn’t because I thought that the other mare would take advantage of any perceived weakness. This was just a matter of personal pride. I didn’t want my roommate to see what kind of loser she’d allowed into her apartment. “Grinder just wanted to talk a little, that’s all.” I absently rubbed the side of my jaw where the stallion had clobbered me. “I convinced him to give me an extension.”

“Oh, really? That’s great!” The mare on the other end of the line actually managed to sound like she was relieved to hear the news. I’d found that she was pretty good at acting like she cared about me. “How long did he give you?”

“Two days,” I admitted, going on to add with more feigned optimism, “which is more time than I need; but that’ll just mean I’ll have a chance to relax and take it easy before getting to work.” The spoken lies came almost as easily as the tonal ones. It was a good thing that this was happening over comms though. The smile on my lips notwithstanding, I could still feel the actual worry and fear that existed just beneath the thin patina of confidence, threatening to finally burst forth from my eyes in the form of tears. Even now they were burning as I fought to keep everything bottled up.

“Two days? You’ll really have the money by then?” Hash asked skeptically.

“I’ve got feelers out with Spyder,” I lied even as my gaze darted to the log of increasingly desperate-sounding messages that I’d sent to the fixer over the last couple of days. The zebra hadn’t responded to the last few, leaving them on ‘read’. An automated reply had greeted my last attempt to contact him; informing me that I’d been blocked from sending any additional messages to him. Not that I blamed him really. Any worthwhile fixer wouldn’t want anything to do with a mare who couldn’t get the job done. And I’d accumulated quite the list of spectacular failures with him.

One had to wonder if blowing my last chances with creatures wasn’t my special talent. I was apparently exceptionally well suited to doing it.

I reinforced my smile, having felt my lips wavering for a moment. I wasn’t going to break while I still had Hash on the line though. I refused to let anypony see me broken. “I’ve got the situation handled.”

There was a brief pause on the other end of the line. “Oh. Well, I’m glad to hear it! I know you don’t need it, but if there’s anything I can do to help feel free to as―”

“A hookup with any fixers you know would be nice,” I blurted before I could stop myself. The moment the words were out of my mouth, I smacked myself with my hoof and winced.

“...What?”

I took a breath and reaffirmed the insincere smile I’d been trying to keep on my lips in the hopes that its presence would help to make me sound as nonchalant about the whole affair as I wanted Hash to believe that I was feeling. “I just mean that a mare can never have too many fixers, right? It’s nice to have options. I know you have connections. Figured you might be able to hook me up with a fixer that would do right by me―not that Spyder’s stiffing me, of course. I just figured I’d see what other offers there were out there.

“For down the road, I mean,” I added. “Obviously I’m good for right now.”

Even as that last lie left my lips, I silently swore; wordlessly berating myself for metaphorically shooting myself in the hoof like this. Spyder would even entertain receiving my calls, let alone line up paying work for me. I desperately needed a new fixer, and now. However, it seemed that, in spite of the fact that my life literally depended on getting Hash’s help, I somehow still couldn’t bring myself to let her know how much I needed it. Without my roommate’s assistance, I wasn’t exactly left with a lot of options for getting my hooves on Grinder’s money.

The smart move, of course, would have been to grow a damn spine and do the work that the crimson stallion had originally asked of me. The money that he was asking for was exactly where it had always been: in the hooves of the creatures who lived on my assigned floors of the megasilo. It was just waiting for me to go and collect it and hoof it over to him. Hypothetically, if I started right now, I could have everything I owed him by tonight.

It was hard though, knocking on those doors and looking into all of those apartments that were even more bare than Hash’s. Seeing the nutribar wrappers that had been licked clean of every crumb because there weren't enough of them to go around to properly feed the family that lived there. Those ponies were barely scraping together the scratch to pay for their shithole of an apartment as it was. They couldn’t afford Grinder’s ‘security fees’. Not if they wanted to eat at all that month.

That wasn’t my problem though. At least, it wasn’t supposed to be. My job was to collect the gibbies from the ponies living on my assigned floors and deliver them to Grinder. If the ponies in question didn’t have enough cash to cover what was due, then I was supposed to take payment in goods…or even crystal and chrome if it came to it. I was one of the herd leader’s ‘Tax Collectors’. In theory anyway.

In practice, I was failing at it pretty hard. I certainly wasn’t cut out to be the cold-hearted bitch that a job like that required me to be. Which was a pity, because I hadn’t been cut out to be much else either. I didn’t have the connections necessary to be any kind of useful liaison with the LCPD to keep them off our back. Nor was I tough―or chromed up―enough to be one of his Enforcers. What few augs I did have were nothing to brag about, and they were only even nominally ‘mine’. Grinder had paid to have them installed when I’d been ‘inducted’ into his boosterherd at the tender age of sixteen. Now it was two years later and somehow I was still well in the red with the earth pony. It didn’t help that I was being charged interest on the ‘debt’ that I owed him for the augs he’d had grafted into me.

“Right. Of course.” Hash agreed quietly. I heard the doubt that lay just beneath her words though. It was the same undertone that I’d heard in my own assurances just a few seconds ago. At some point during the conversation, she’d become aware of my lies but was refraining from acknowledging them. I wasn’t sure if I felt the other mare was being kind or patronizing by declining to call me out on my bullshit. There was a pause, then, “I’ve, uh, gotta make some calls. See you soon, bloomba; stay safe.” The call went silent.

I let out a mirthless snort, the ‘smile’ finally falling off of my face completely. I found myself idly wondering if at least one of those calls wasn’t going to be the mare sniffing around for a new roommate. Not that I could really blame her if that was the case. It wasn’t like I’d come up with my share of the rent for this month yet. I’m pretty sure I’d also been a little light on last month’s too, but Hash had assured me that I’d been square the last time I tried to give her a few gibbies for it. Something about the rent on the apartment going down and so my share had shrunk accordingly. Which had to have been one of the worst lies ever conceived of, because rent never went down in Light City.

My gaze rose slowly as I continued my meandering trudge down the street. Ahead of me lay the vibrant light display that was downtown. I’d been there once as a filly. Sort of. I’d taken a train that went near it on the way to a borough on the far side. I remember my eyes growing so wide that there’d probably been a legitimate danger of them falling right out of my head. I’d never seen such beautiful and shiny buildings before. Their surfaces had shown like polished gemstones. Their contours had been fluid and graceful. It was like they had been designed as pieces of massive installation art which had only been later repurposed as buildings that creatures lived and worked in. Nothing like the dingy gray concrete boxes of cramped apartments that I’d lived in my whole life.

Looking at it though, even from down here, it was easy to see why so many creatures on Equus held Light City in such high regard: It was the definition of grace and splendor, with buildings fit for an alicorn.

Not that any of them lived there. Not anymore. Supposedly Princess Starlight Glimmer had once resided in the tower which now played host to GlimTech’s corporate headquarters. I wasn’t sure how much of that was fact and how much was just PR bluster to puff themselves up and seem more important than their competitors. To me it rang about as hollow as Aeriesaka’s own boasting about how they were tightly connected with the neighboring griffon nation’s recently restored royal family. To my knowledge, the king of Gryphus had never made an appearance anywhere in Light City since coming to power.

In that same vein, I hadn’t heard the news mention any of Equestria’s princesses swinging by anytime in the last few decades either. Everycreature was pretty sure they’d all washed their hooves of this ‘Grand Experiment’ of theirs. I let off another snort. If the city’s own cream of the crop weren’t worth even a cursory visit from the alicorns who set it all up, then where did that rank me on the societal ladder?

I was just a couple blocks away from the building where I lived when I came to a stop. My gaze darted over to the flashing neon sign hovering above my head. ‘The Trough’. I frowned. I really didn’t have the spare gibbies to justify a drink; not with the deadline I had hanging over my head. On the other hoof, it wasn’t like the price of a drink or two was going to affect whether or not I managed to get Grinder the full amount I owed in the end. I headed inside.

Despite being lit, the atmosphere of the bar’s interior was a lot dimmer than the city exterior was in the dead of night. That was part of the aesthetic though: brooding, quiet, and soothing. Not always my scene, to be honest. Most times I needed a real club with throbbing music, bright flashing lights, and a sea of warm bodies thrashing about to help get my mind off my troubles. A slew of distractions that would let me forget about everything that sucked in my life until the inevitable hangover the next morning. I was too depressed for loud music and dancing right now though. I just wanted a drink and to be alone with my thoughts. Like most evenings when it was the time of the month I was supposed to be collecting dues.

The griffon tiercel behind the bar noted my entrance. His beak broke out into a warm smile and he stopped wiping down the glass he’d been cleaning long enough to give me a friendly wave. “Hey, Pel. The usual?”

I sat my rump down far heavier on the stool than I’d meant to, all of the tension that I’d been carrying from my earlier meeting with Grinder finally leaving my body and allowing the fatigue that it had been holding back to wash over me all at once. I shook my head. “Not tonight, Gare. Strongest stuff you got. A double.”

The griffon’s azure eyes widened briefly in surprise at the request, which was a far cry from my usual White Stalliongrad or Shetland Slammer. He turned to grab a bottle of whiskey, but hesitated as he did a double-take, apparently having finally noticed my split lip and no-doubt swelling eye from where Grinder had clobbered me. “Shit, girl; you alright?”

I sank lower in my seat, turning my head away from the bartender. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.” I assured him, trying to use the high collar of my jacket to help hide my injuries from his sight. A futile effort, obviously; but Gary was kind enough to take the hint and stop staring at them. I could tell that he wanted to press me for details though. That spurred some feelings of annoyance deep within me. I’d seen the way the griffon acted with other patrons in his bar when they made it clear that they didn’t want to discuss their personal lives. He never looked at them like he was looking at me now: with pity. Letting me know how pathetic he thought I was. Like I was some useless filly that needed to be coddled.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I didn’t want to think about that now. This was about forgetting. Forgetting Grinder. Forgetting the deadline. Forgetting why I was in this mess in the first place. Drinking and forgetting. That was why I was here.

A glass was wordlessly deposited in front of me. A second later it was filled with a generous helping of dark brown fluid whose aroma stung my nostrils. I wasn’t a fan of straight liquor. It smelled pungent and burned my throat. That was why I preferred mixed drinks most nights. Not tonight though. Tonight I wanted to hurt inside as much as I did outside. Stupid drink decisions to provide fitting company for my stupid life decisions.

The jewel at the base of my horn glowed as I pulled a wad of very heavily crumpled up bills from the pocket of my vest. I suppressed a grimace as I glimpsed the collection of low denominations. With a sigh, I placed the whole wad on the counter and gave it a gentle shove with my magic towards the griffon.

Gary glanced down at the offered payment. I kept my eyes locked onto the glass in front of me, not trusting myself to look in his direction. Even though those bills represented every gibby I had left to my name, what I’d put on the counter wasn’t quite enough to cover even this one drink. I knew that. So I didn’t dare touch it in case the bartender―very rightfully―took it back and told me to leave. A customer that could afford to pay for even a couple ounces of alcohol had no business taking up a seat in a bar; even if it was obvious that this wasn’t a very busy time of night.

“It’s on the house tonight, Pel.” The tiercel finally said in a quiet voice. “Customer loyalty discount―” He’d started to push the crumpled up bills back in my direction with one of his talons when I suddenly slammed a hoof on the counter, pinning the gibbies down where they were. Gary recoiled with a jerk, staring at me with startled eyes.

I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t trust myself to maintain my composure if I did. ‘Customer loyalty discount’. What a load of minotaur droppings. I wasn’t a damn charity case! I wasn’t completely worthless. I might not be able to come up with what I owed Grinder; but I could pay for a fucking drink at a dive bar, damn it!

“Take. The money. Gary.” I said through gritted teeth, inwardly wincing as I heard the faint quavering in my voice. I was on the edge of breaking down and I knew it.

For a brief moment, I thought that the griffon was going to fight me on this. He looked like he wanted to insist on comping my drink, but then thought better of it. He finally nodded and pulled the gryphusbits back towards himself. “Yeah. Okay.” He paused for a moment, glanced at the bottle of liquor that he was still holding in his other talon, and then set it down next to my glass. “Finish off the bottle if you want. Not enough for another drink anyway.”

This was a lie too. There was at least another three shots worth of whiskey still sloshing around in it from what I could tell. I was about to levitate the bottle away and put it back on the shelf where it belonged, but…I let out a rough sigh. Damn me if I didn’t need the alcohol tonight.

Instead, I used my magic to pick up my glass and throw its contents back down my throat. The cut on the inside of my cheek stung where the alcohol made contact before I swallowed the double helping of whiskey. It burned all the way down my throat, but the warmth flooding my body was a welcome sensation. I let out a shuddering breath, bowing my head and holding it in my hooves. My eyes were squeezed shut.

I was so fucked…

Two days to come up with fifteen thousand gibbies? And I’d just zeroed out my entire remaining balance on a glass of booze I couldn’t even afford? I wasn’t going to be able to pull it off. I was going to show back up at the warehouse in two days, empty hoofed, and Grinder was going to flatline me and strip me down for parts. The worst part was that I couldn’t even run away because I had literally nothing. I was going to have to find something left in my closet to hock just to afford to eat tomorrow as it was!

…Or I could mare up and do my fucking job, I thought acidly. Pound on doors and shake ponies down like I was supposed to have done in the first place. Grinder was just going to send one of the others to do it anyway after he zeroed me the night after next. And whoever took my place was unlikely to be anywhere near as accommodating as I’d been. A lot of creatures were going to be hurting by this time next week when the earth pony’s new ‘tax mare’ started making the rounds.

So why shouldn’t I just get on with it myself? Who exactly was I helping by holding back like I was? Certainly not myself.

It was just…

…I knew what it was like to be on the other side of that door when one of Grinder’s goons came knocking. I knew the look in a mother’s eyes when they had to tell their foals that there wasn’t going to be any dinner that night because they needed to save the gibbies for when that knock came. I’d seen that heartbreak in my mother too many times growing up. The shame she felt. The beatings she took when the shame became too much to bear and she fed me instead of paying the protection money. Some nights, I could still hear how she’d pleaded when they took her and my father’s wedding bangles to make up the difference.

Her cries of pain when Grinder’s thugs got tired of hearing those pleas and beat her unconscious.

…The sounds of the hooves landing against her body the night she never got up again.

Could I really bring myself to do that to other creatures? Even if my very life depended on it? Could I be responsible for planting this kind of hurt in another young filly’s heart?

I knew what the answer was, of course. No matter how much I tried to argue with myself and rationalize things, I kept coming back to the same conclusion. If I was capable of changing my mind―if I could turn myself into that kind of mare―I’d have done so long before my situation had gotten this dire.

Somehow, knowing that didn’t make it any easier.

When I got back to the apartment, Hash Stack wasn’t anywhere to be found. She was probably out working. That mare kept odd hours, I’d learned. I wasn’t entirely sure what she did to support herself, but it wasn’t anything like a steady job. She was at the apartment far too often for that. She didn’t talk about the specifics much, but I’d gleaned that it was some sort of gig setup, where she performed one-off jobs for creatures. Not anything that involved fixers like the kind I sometimes did work for though, not that I knew of. She seemed to travel in similar circles though, which is why I’d asked her over the call about references.

She probably did short-term contract work. Something techy. She was a real wiz with computers. She’d updated the matrices for my shards on more than one occasion, and neither I―nor my implanted talismans―could tell her pirate patch-jobs from the legitimate manufacturer updates. Which was great, because I couldn’t afford the licensed patches that got sporadically released.

On more than one occasion, I wondered what a brilliant mare like her was doing slumming around down here in the flank-end of Haywood with the rest of us donks. Her past wasn't any of my business, of course. Plenty of creatures had reasons for the less-than-nova lives that they were leading. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that Hash was a former corporate drone who’d pissed off the wrong executive and got her credentials revoked, keeping her from ever working a legit white collar job again. It was a real shame if that was the case though. That mare was the kindest creature that I’d ever met in Light City.

Hash didn’t deserve to live out the rest of her life in a gutter like this. She wasn’t like me.

I glanced around the sparse amenities of the apartment. Of what little was here, pretty much everything belonged to Hash. Everything I had a personal claim to was either hanging in my barren half of the closet or rattling around in the drawer beneath my mattress. I stopped by the former and carefully stripped off my vest. My eyes traced over the powder blue sleeveless leather jacket, inspecting it for any damage that it might have suffered during my previous ‘discussion’ with Grinder. I used my telekinesis to buff out a couple of dirt smudges that I’d missed earlier. It didn’t look too bad otherwise, aside from the new hydraulic stain that I’d need to find a way to clean.

My eyes lingered very briefly on the patch sewn into the back of the vest, depicting a white-winged yellow thunderbolt. The blurry image of a stallion’s golden face passed through my head. It was an early memory, maybe even my earliest. It was also the only one I had of him. I sighed and hung up the jacket. My next stop was the washroom to get myself cleaned up.

I finally got my first real look at the damage that Grinder had done. The split lip I’d already figured out. The bruising on my cheek and swelling eye I’d been anticipating. The scrape on my chin was news to me though. Must have been from when I’d hit the floor. I sat down and glanced at where I’d been bucked in my stomach. Some bruising was visible just beneath the yellow fur there too. Awesome.

My eyes darted to my mane now. I used my telekinesis to smooth out some wisps of hair that had been mussed while I’d been rolling on the floor. A frown creased my lips as I bent in closer to the mirror and took note of the chromatic roots of my mane which had become significantly more blatant than I remembered them being the last time I’d taken stock. I was clearly in need of a touch-up with more bleaching agent. Not that I had the gibbies for any. No help for it then, I lamented.

I took a quick shower to wash the dried blood out of my coat, along with the grime I’d picked up from the warehouse floor. I’d never been more grateful that Hash hadn’t insisted on individualizing the utilities in the apartment. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to afford the water for the shower tonight. My magic snagged a towel and began to vigorously rub at my coat as I made my way out of the washroom. I only padded my mane and tail though, as though drying them too roughly might further expedite revealing their true colors. I was pretty sure that wasn’t how bleaching them worked, but I still didn’t want to take the chance. It was hard enough being taken seriously as it was without the childishly colorful coiffure complicating things. Creatures expected a brightly-colored mare to be bright and cheerful and nice; and I didn’t want to be thought of as any of those things when I was trying to appear like a tough member of a boosterherd.

It was at about this moment that my stomach growled. I closed my eyes and sighed. I hadn’t eaten since waking up that morning. Given that it was closing in on three AM currently, that had been the better part of twenty-four hours ago. Not that I had any money left to slip into the apartment’s vendor for a meal. I’d had to drink some of the water from the showerhead to quench my thirst because I knew I couldn’t afford a bottle from the machine either.

I’d have to wait until later in the morning. Maybe I could find somepony willing to give me a couple of gibbies for my last shirt. Enough for a nutribar from a vending machine at least.

I wandered over to my sleeping nook on the side of the room. My gaze darted briefly to the nook above, where Hash Stack slept. Freshly laundered sheets and a brilliantly white comforter covered her mattress. Screens had been installed along the sides and top of the sleeping berth which played seemingly endless vistas of skyscapes and starry nights deepening on the time. She once told me that pegasi weren’t comfortable sleeping low to the ground like this, and got antsy if they weren’t “outside on a cloud” for long periods. This setup helped.

Meanwhile, my berth was sterile; bereft of any images or photos, let alone screens. I didn’t even have any sheets on my mattress anymore. I sold them off a week ago to afford food. Hash had offered to give me some of hers, but I’d refused.

I didn’t crawl into my bed so much as I collapsed onto it, my eyes staring blankly ahead at the empty wall. I was beyond exhausted, and yet I couldn’t find sleep. My thoughts continued to circle back around to Grinder’s ultimatum, and the futility of hoping to avoid my fate. Was there even a point in selling my last shirt for a nutribar? What did it really matter if I ate today? I’d just end up dying feeling slightly less hungry. One of those tasteless, vitamin-packed, calorie bricks wouldn’t exactly make for a particularly thrilling last meal either.

How sad was that? I couldn’t even find a way to die that wasn’t pathetic…

I closed my eyes and curled up into a tight ball on the mattress. Putting pressure on my gut at least took the edge off of the worst of the hunger pangs. Mostly. No sleep found me, but at least it sort of felt like I was being held by somepony. A tear burned just behind my firmly-shut eyelids.

I jerked as I heard the door open. An exhausted, nutrient-deprived, part of my brain elected to conclude that it was Grinder entering, having come to finish me off earlier than threatened. It was only a second later that my thoughts reached the more rational conclusion that, since there hadn’t been a door chime preceding the opening, it could realistically only have been my roommate returning. However, it was a realization that came too late to do my spiked heart rate much good.

I raised my head and turned to watch the lithe pegasus mare I roomed with flutter into the apartment. She immediately scanned her surroundings until she spotted me in my berth. A flurry of emotions swiftly flew across her delicate ivory features, her pink eyes wide with worry and concern.

“Pel! Oh princesses; look at you!” She alit at the side of my bed, the gemstones encrusting the leading edges of her wings fading as she wordlessly discontinued the flight spell she’d floated in on. She craned her head to get a better look at my own injured face. A wing absently brushed aside a swath of her electric blue mane that was obstructing her vision. Her other wingtip instinctively reached for my chin, but drew up short when she saw me recoil away. The reaction had been reflexive. A lifetime of experience had taught me that ponies only wanted to get at your face so that they could hit it. Deep down, I knew that Hash wouldn’t hurt me like that though. However, she was an exception to the rule. The pegasus chewed at her lip, but made no further move to try and inspect my injuries.

Her eyes hardened now. “That bastard went too far this time,” she hissed, her lips curling into a sneer.

I let out a mirthless snort. If Hash thought that me getting a little roughed up like this was Grinder ‘taking things too far’, I wondered what she was going to have to say about him when he had me rent limb from limb at the end of the week? “It’s nothing,” I insisted. I even almost believed it this time.

“It’s not ‘nothing’!” The other mare countered, her wing pinions bristling with barely contained outrage. “He didn’t need to do that to you. What exactly does beating you up accomplish, huh?! What, did the gibbies he was after leak out of that split lip of yours?” She clicked her tongue in frustration. “He was just hurting you because he likes hurting ponies. It’s sick.”

Hash really was too precious for this world, I thought to myself. She’d probably actually miss me when I was gone…

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter.” The flier shook her head and changed topics. When she spoke again, her expression was more hopeful. “I have a job happening tomorrow―actually, I suppose it’s technically later today, now that I look at the time―and I need you along for it. You in? It pays good.”

My ears perked up even as my head canted in confusion. Hash needed me to help with one of her jobs? Since when? I didn’t have anything close to approaching a marketable skill set when it came to the pegasus’ usual line of work. Heck, I barely even had any of the skills that Grinder was interested in for his gang! Shaking down the ponies in this building for protection money was basically the stallion giving me one last chance to prove that I was capable of doing anything that helped his crew. I wasn’t particularly good at fighting or accessing computers, which left me just this side of useless for a lot of tasks.

I was sure that I didn’t have what it took to be of use to Hash. “You want me to help you?” I just about laughed at the absurdity of it all. “How exactly? I barely understand any of what you do. I’m sure I’d just slow you down more than anything.”

“I…” The pegasus stammered, chewing on her lip again as she sought out how she wanted to phrase her argument for having me along. It didn’t help her case―or my self-esteem―that it felt like she was having to struggle really hard to justify including me in whatever it was she was going to be doing. “Look, it’s just not something that one mare can do, okay? I need two sets of hooves, and I only have one. It's as simple as that. So I’m subcontracting you, okay? I need a pony I can trust, and I trust you more than anypony.” She insisted.

I was still skeptical about exactly how much of an asset I could prove to be to the mare, but if Hash really needed my help with something, I supposed that it was the least that I could do. Especially if she was paying me for the effort. Maybe I could use the money to hold Grinder off for a few more days until I could come up with the rest of what I owed him. “Okay then; sure thing, Hash. I’ll help. What’s the pay, anyway?”

“How deep are you in with Grinder?”

“I need fifteen thou by the day after tomorrow,” I answered, doing my best not to say the number without sounding like it was the unachievable sum that it was. Like I routinely handled five-figure transactions on a daily basis. I was fairly sure I’d pulled it off too.

“Your cut’s twenty-kay,” Hash said almost immediately.

My jaw just about hit the floor. As in, I was legitimately afraid that my mouth would actually detach itself from its mounting and fall off my face; that was how fast it dropped. Twenty Thousand gibbies?! To help the pegasus out with a one-night job? Was she serious? No. This was a dream. That was the only reasonable explanation. I’d fallen asleep, and now I was dreaming about a way out of my predicament. None of this was real.

I reached up and smacked myself hard across the face.

Ow.

Okay, this probably wasn’t a dream after all. Though, that did beg the question: “What do you need me for that’s worth that kind of scratch?!” Then I had a follow-up thought. “And if that’s my cut, what the fuck are you getting paid?!” That probably wasn’t the most polite inquiry, and I’d never made it my business before to question what kind of work the pegasus did or the compensation she typically received. It just wasn’t my business. However, I’d never in my wildest dreams considered that Hash could be earning gibbies anywhere close to the scale that was being suggested here. If twenty thousand represented the little cut that I was entitled to for my part in this, then Hash had to be collecting something in the six figure range from whoever had commissioned her.

If this was reflective of the typical jobs she’d been doing up until now, then what the fuck was she doing living in this shithole with me? Why’d she even need a roommate for that matter? ‘Disgraced corpo drone’ or not, Hash should be absolutely living it up in a plush penthouse somewhere if she was capable of coming across jobs like this even just a couple times a year!

Hash’s lips cocked in a wry smile. “Enough,” was her simple reply to my second question it seemed. “As for what you’ll be doing: I need a pony watching my back while I do some nettrotting. It’s going to be some more intense stuff than I usually get into, so I won’t be able to keep track of my body’s physical surroundings the way I usually can. I need a pony I can trust ‘minding my meat’ while I’m out.”

“And foalsitting your body for an hour is worth twenty thousand gryphusbits?” I asked skeptically. Either Hash was having me on, or Spyder had been grossly underpaying me for the few gigs I managed to actually get right.

“Are you saying that my body isn’t worth at least twenty kay?” The pegasus mare countered, pouting at me and feigning being disappointed with my valuation of her. “That hurts, Pel. Right in here.” She tapped her hoof to her chest over her heart. Her smile returned. “It’s my subcontract. I get to decide what I think the job is worth, and I think keeping me safe for an hour is worth twenty thousand gibbies.

“You want the gig or not?”

“Of course I want it!” I blurted almost immediately. Then I mentally winced at how desperate-sounding I’d likely come off. While I knew that hardly anypony would have hesitated agreeing to a simple-sounding job like this one, especially with such a massive payday being dangled in front of them, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the details of my specific situation were causing me to cast aside my better judgment. Whatever Hash Stack might insist otherwise, one of the first things that anypony in Light City learned was that there was no such thing as a ‘free lunch’. High pay came with high risk. If there were no obvious risks, then that meant that there were some pretty serious strings attached.

For a corpo drone that was chained to their terminal five days a week, that might mean that those six-figure salaries with added Health Harras coverage came with intrusive spell matrices in their implants that monitored everything they saw and did for any sign of deception or impropriety. They gave up just about any semblance of privacy or autonomy for a comfortable life. That was the trade off for ponies living high in those crystal towers downtown though. Here in the gutters, the stakes were often much higher. If you wanted to earn life-changing quantities of scratch, that typically meant putting your life on the line more often than not.

Not too different from the way members of MaxTack earned their benefits and pay: by charging into the heart of extreme danger when some gem-encrusted and chromed-out psycho went on a rampage in the city.

If Hash was ‘subcontracting’, then that presumably meant that she was paying me out of her cut of whatever she was getting from her direct employer. I couldn’t imagine that the pegasus was giving me the manticore’s share of her earnings either. So, if she was willing to split off twenty thousand gryphusbits for me, then she was getting more than double that amount―at least fifty thousand. For one job. One that, according to her, would take an hour or less of her own time.

Nettrotting was an in-demand skill, sure; and one that often entitled ponies to preem pay. Especially if they were preem trotters―of which I knew Hash was one. However, even I knew that this was all sounding way too excessive for anything that would be objectively safe, simple…or legal. Not that I was averse to a little petty crime. Not that paydays like this were associated with ‘petty’ criminal activity. This was sounding to me like the sort of thing that would get NetWatch brought down on us.

What was Hash getting herself into? What was she getting me into?

What was I still doing even debating this? Whatever the risks of going with Hash might be, they had to be considerably lower than what I was risking by not paying Grinder what I owed him!

“Great!” The tiny white flier beamed at me with a wide grin. “I still need to set up a few things for the op. I’ll meet you at Seventeenth Street and Garland? Eight o’clock tonight?”

“Yeah. Eight at Seventeen and Garland. I’ll be there,” I acknowledged, feeling giddy, and a little numb. This still felt more than a little surreal. All of my problems were really going to be solved tonight with an hour-long gig? Well, maybe not all of them. Paying Grinder the protection money I was supposed to have gotten for him didn’t even begin to touch on the debt that I still owed to the earth pony for my implants. I was in a lot deeper to the gang leader than a few thou for those after all of the accumulated interest that was padding my debt. So I was still going to be doing his bidding for a long while yet. A few decades at the rate I was paying him back, last time I did the math.

Still, this was going to be a huge help.

“Preem! See you then, bloomba!” Hash turned and spread her wings. The jewels embedded in them glowed to life and she hopped into the air, gliding back towards the apartment’s exit before drawing up just short of the door. She glanced back at me for one furtive second and then cleared her throat very loudly. Loudly enough that I―almost―missed the sound of the apartment’s vendor dispensing something. “Oh! I, um…left some leftovers in the vendor,” she said, jabbing a hoof in the direction of the food dispenser built into the wall. “I wasn’t as hungry as I thought, so there’s an extra Nutri-Graze bar there. Eyes were bigger than my stomach again, heh,” the flier offered an anemic little laugh. “It’s yours if you want it…”

She let the offer hang in the air between us for a few seconds before finally flitting out the door, letting it seal behind her. I stared at the closed door for a good while after the pegasus was gone, my brain still trying to wrap itself around what had just transpired. I’d barely even paid any attention to her mention of the available leftovers. When I finally got around to acknowledging it, I was a little surprised to find that I wasn’t feeling my usual mixture of shame and incredulity at the blatant charity. Not that this was anything new with her.

Hash always seemed to manage to ‘accidentally’ order a second meal bar from the apartment’s vendor, or suddenly not feel hungry anymore. Multiple times per week there’d always be some excuse as to why her dinner should become mine. I usually wasn’t shy about rebuking her―depending on how many days it had been since I’d last eaten―for the same reason that I’d snapped at Gary earlier that night when he’d tried to comp my drink: I wasn’t a charity case. If I couldn’t support myself somehow, that was my problem, not somepony else’s. I wasn’t going to weigh down others with my failings. Other ponies didn’t have to put themselves out for my sake. I’d spent my foalhood being a burden to those I cared about; like my mother.

I wasn’t going to be that for anypony else.
On the other hoof, I couldn’t deny how good it felt right now to have been offered a lifeline by my roommate in the form of that job. I was also really hungry…

Author's Note

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