Fallout Equestria: Uplift

Chapters

Chapter 1: The End
Chapter 2: The Middle
Chapter 3: The Beginning
Chapter 4: Thoroughly Modern Millie
Chapter 5: Death & Taxes
Chapter 6: The Soul in a Silver Thimble
Chapter 7: Brave New World
Chapter 8: Compass Points

Chapter 1: The End

October 31st, 1077
Day Zero

Vik cracked one bleary eye open and squinted against the glare of the cheap clock radio on her equally cheap nightstand. She frowned when the little red numbers came into focus. Two minutes before seven. Two fucking minutes before her alarm was set to go off.

What the hell? She always slept like a stone. It was why she had a second alarm set to go off ten minutes after the first, and tuned to Equestria’s godawful public radio station so she’d be extra motivated to shut the thing off. She lay there for a few more seconds trying to stitch together what little she could remember of the dream she had, suspecting that was the culprit that dragged her up early, and then she heard the unmistakable sound of splashing liquid coming from the ceiling. It clicked and she let out a low groan as the upstairs neighbor subjected her to the barely muffled music of his draining bladder.

The glowing fifty-eight blinked into a fifty-nine. Her neighbor finished his morning victual and she listened to his hooves thudding down the apartment ceiling, cupboards creaking and clapping shut as he started his day. Vik dug a nugget of sleepsand from the corner of her eye with the rounded end of her claw, then flicked it away. One of the joys that came with cheap living was thin walls and even less privacy. You couldn’t blow your nose without the dragon next door hearing snot hit tissue, although since coming to Equestria Vik rarely ever met anyone who didn’t walk on four legs and wear a tattoo on their ass. Some days it felt like–

“...held a press conference on Tuesday during which she expressed optimism that the Ministry of Peace and Ambassador Abyssian may be close to a temporary ceasefire agreement, in spite of protests by many government officials who claim a ceasefire to be tantamount to surrender. Since the beginning of the zebra oil embargos which forced Princess Celestia and Princess Luna to declare war nearly five years ago, more than one hundred and twenty thousand service ponies have been–”

It took Vik three tries before she finally swatted the snooze button. She considered letting herself doze off. Snatch back the sleep she’d been robbed of before the radio clicked on again. Then the stallion upstairs trumpeted a belch whose volume and duration could peel paint, and as she listened to her neighbor’s sleepy chuckle Vik felt suddenly motivated to take a fucking shower.

As she rolled out of bed and dragged a clean towel from the unfolded pile in the laundry basket, her thoughts inevitably turned bitter when she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She stared at herself and the cheap bathroom decor behind her. Not her bathroom. Not her home. Just the rented room she could afford in the foreign land she’d been forced to start her life over in. If she closed her eyes she knew she would see the smudged, black letters atop the letter that turned her reality inside out:

Order to Report for Induction

She grimaced and turned the tap to the hottest setting, and watched rusty water sputter from the calcium crusted shower head as the memory gave up its front row seat. Her towel flopped to the floor beside the tub. She stepped into the stream and tried to settle her nerves as the slow build of heat eased some of that habitual tension. That had been four years ago.

You need to let it go, she lectured herself. It wouldn’t work, but she would keep doing it for that fleeting feeling of control over her situation that it gave.

She never needed daily showers back home - one of the perks of scales; hers being a shade of iridescent ivory that edged toward lavender in dim light. But here in the Land of Pony where manes and tails had a tendency to pick up a certain aroma in a very short amount of time, it wasn’t just enough to wash out the day’s dirt. In the civilized world, for that was where she lived now, folks were supposed to smell good. Like flowers, or fruits, or Alpine Timber Rush™ if your tackle game in the pendulous variety. Vik’s concession to assimilation amounted to a bottle of bargain priced shampoo that smelled like the bastard offspring of a lilac bush and a sack of mints. It was the only stuff they sold around here that didn’t make the skin under her scales break out in a rash, plus it was almost always on clearance. She squirted a blob of the green stuff into her palm, rubbed it into a lather, and dragged it over the top of her deep violet crest. Then she mechanically worked her way down her face, shoulders, and elsewhere.

Her lip quirked into a smile as she worked, remembering the care package Pike had given her on the day she moved into this apartment. Among the fruits, spreads, and kitchen essentials had been something called a loofah. The little cardboard tag attached to it explained its purpose and when she finally tried it out, she discovered with abrupt discomfort what the prickly side of velcro felt like when all those tiny loops on the soft side snagged in your hooks. Only in her case the tiny loops were the loofah and the hooks had been her own scales. It hadn’t been her first, nor would it be her last encounter with the millions of inane little incompatibilities between her and this society built with quadrupeds in mind.

She pulled the showerhead from its holster on the wall and rinsed her scales under the pleasantly scalding stream. The drain gurgled as she stepped out onto the cold linoleum and toweled off. Upstairs, her neighbor had begun to sing some tune she didn’t recognize. A pan clanked on his stovetop and she felt a jealous pang for those who could live a cramped existence in these apartments and still find the motivation to cook their own breakfast.

She brushed, flossed, and gargled a minty antiseptic that lit her gums on fire. Then she padded back to her bedroom and pulled open the folding door of her closet. As always, she deflated a little when she saw the rack of mostly empty hangers. She missed having a wardrobe. It hadn’t been every day that she went out wearing something, but having the option to look nice had been… well, nice. She wondered who had ended up with her clothes back home. Maybe charity. Maybe some militia officer’s wife. She’d learned from experience that when you sock a military dragon in the jaw and slam the door in their face, there tends not to be a lot of free time available to pack a bag.

She sighed as she dragged a familiar set of black medical scrubs off the two occupied hangers and pulled them on. The stiff polyester hissed over her scales as she made her way to the kitchenette and fished a granola bar out of the cupboard. She bit off half and chewed absently as she ducked into the rattling fridge and uncapped a square jug adorned with smiling, anthropomorphic oranges. She ignored their manic grins and took several pulls from the carton, barely registering the foul shift in flavor as citrus met with the remnants of wintergreen toothpaste. She capped the OJ, absently scratching at the embroidered CryoLife logo beneath her left collarbone where it always snagged at her scales, and set it back in the fridge.

Her living room wasn’t any bigger than her bedroom, which was saying it was barely large enough to fit a couch in the thing. Chewing the other half of her breakfast bar, Vik retrieved her keys from the coffee table and resigned herself to another ten hours of being paid to be bored. On the plus side, at least, today she shared a shift with Pike. He was always worth his weight in good conversation and, if she was lucky, even better coffee.

With her second alarm still droning the news of the day from her darkened bedroom, she locked her apartment door behind her and padded her way down a hallway festooned with Nightmare Night decorations. She yawned, mindful not to show the sharp points of her teeth despite the empty hall, and shouldered her way out into another sunny morning in Equestria.

Sometimes, when her mood was fouled up, she had a tendency to dismiss Buckskin Bay as a dump. That wasn’t an entirely fair assessment and she knew as much. Buckskin Bay wasn’t a dump. The locals used kinder synonyms. Quiet. Serene. Uncomplicated. Quaint. Buckskin Bay was a town that had tried and failed to brand itself as a resort town. Flanked by the Lunar Sea to the west and picturesque mountains to the north, and home to only a few thousand ponies, it was as picturesque as it was remote. The water was too cold most times of the year for swimming and the beach was more rock than sand, giving it that rugged look that nature photographers loved and beachgoers rarely traveled hundreds of miles to sun themselves on.

As far as Vik was concerned, it was as good as she was going to get. Buckskin Bay was as near to the other side of the planet from her homeland as she could reasonably get without living on a boat. As far as the Equestrian government was concerned, the dragonlands were just another backward corner of the globe whose laws were politely acknowledged and officially ignored. So she’d coldcocked a member of the militia. So what? There was an argument to be made in favor of clocking them all in the jaw as far and tossed into the fucking ocean during riptide. If they wanted to call her a fugitive, fine. She wasn’t going to hitch her wagon to some suicidal global war because some psycho with a scepter said so. Fuck every last one of them for not having the spine to call out Ember’s insanity.

She shrugged off that old ghost as she followed the sidewalk from her shady two-floor apartment building to the corner of the aptly named Central Avenue that bisected the town before it became Old Highway 19 once it wove its way inland through the miles of dense pine forests. She turned west, toward the glittering oceanfront at the distant terminus of Central, and listened to the clicking of her claws over freshly swept concrete as she walked the eight blocks to the largest building in Buckskin Bay second only to the hospital directly across the street from it. A few carriages motored through mostly empty intersections, the town still an hour away from waking up, and she lifted her palm in polite greeting when one of the morning folk acknowledged her passage.

Buckskin Bay was one of those towns that looked great on a postcard and not much else. Vik passed the corner store that served as the community’s grocery, a place that was as quaint as it was apt to run out of anything if demand even became moderate. The only thing they never seemed to get enough of was Sparkle-Cola. Vik was pretty sure if a flood washed out the single road into town, the ministries would find a way to bring in that fizzy brown rotgut in by sea even if it meant turning the boat ramp used by local fishers into a port fit for warships. There was a joke she’d heard more than once: the only things that’ll survive the balefire apocalypse are cockroaches and Sparkle-Cola.

Wearing her black scrubs with the CryoLife logo on her chest, it took an effort of will not to feel like a fraud as she came within earshot of the medical staff loitering outside the hospital across the street. The extra floor that Seaside Hospital boasted - five floors to CryoLife’s four - only emphasized the fact that what her employer called medicine was as much of a sham as the branded scrubs they made her wear. On that side of the pavement were the lifesavers and miracle workers. On this side…

Vik shouldered her way through the glass doors and reminded herself, not for the first time, to stop pissing on her own parade.

CryoLife’s main floor wasn’t so much a lobby as it was a glorified shrine to itself. Her talons clicked over polished black marble feathered with white quartz. Decorative square pillars rose up to the ceiling in a neat row that doubled as the lobby’s pathway while also serving as flat surfaces from which to suspend framed artwork, company slogans, and gushing endorsements from customers and investors alike. From a pillar passing by on Vik’s right, a larger than life photo of the company’s founders - a pair of stallions whom she had never met and whose matching candystripe manes and tails made her think of a pair of well dressed carnies - stood on either side of an alabaster mare with a thin smile and a simple blue diamond pinned to the lapel of her black vest. Each time Vik walked past the poster with its unspoken implication of the Ministry of Image’s approval, she thought she could see a faint twist of exasperation in the mare’s eyes.

At the far end of the gaudy lobby sat a large reception desk that dwarfed the young mare behind it. The mare glanced up at Vik, then visibly looked back down at the book she was always reading so Vik wouldn’t think she was staring. It was a look Vik was used to by now, and which she knew she would have to stay used to for many years to come. Even in the huge cities these ponies had built further down the coast, dragons were about as common as winning lottery tickets. Up here in the boonies, Vik was liable to make a two-headed albino phoenix feel average by comparison.

“Good morning, Miss Chambers. Happy Nightmare Night.”

Her eyes flicked up toward the ceiling where CryoLife’s biggest waste of bits watched her from its many hidden electronic eyes. The hospital across the street might be one floor taller, but they didn’t have the world’s most advanced artificial assistant living in their walls.

“Mornin’ Mills,” she mumbled back, brushing off the flash of irritation that came with the AI’s use of her old name. How many bits had the founders paid Robronco for a copy of M.I.L.L.I.E. just to have it serve as a glorified door greeter? More than she would ever see in her lifetime, she guessed.

She passed the reception desk and its young warden, walked past both sets of elevators which had a small gathering of ponies staring up at its floor counter with the weary expressions of non-morning people, and pushed through the solitary door of the emergency stairwell.

By now she was used to the odd glances she earned by taking the stairs. She didn’t mind those either. She’d grown up in an overcrowded gutter, climbed her way into a life that bordered on comfortable, had it stripped away and fled her homeland with nothing but her own wings to carry her across an unforgiving ocean to a continent whose equine inhabitants were deadset on finding new and horrifying ways to redefine the word “warfare”... but watching those gilded metal doors slide shut on an elevator car full of ponies gave her a serious case of the heebie fuckin’ jeebies.

No way. Not even for laughs.

Her footfall echoed on the empty steps as she passed the neatly stenciled markers for each of the building’s five sublevels. She found her cadence as she trotted past the maintenance level where a massive boiler kept them all toasty warm in the winter, past the floor containing a climate controlled room where the company’s electronic archives were backed up onto state-of-the-art Robronco servers, and around the railing again until she reached the bottom landing where a fire extinguisher sat in a red, dust coated box beside a door labeled simply: Cold Storage.

Vik tipped her snout up to the semi translucent black hemisphere mounted above the door and gave it her most sarcastic smile. “Don’t make me late for work, Millie.”

A pause. She never understood why Millie, a supposedly advanced artificial intelligence capable of billions of computations per second, ever needed to pause. Maybe it was being petulant. More likely, it was another overmarketed bit of Robronco kit. They weren’t exactly a company known for their reservedness.

“Welcome back, Miss Chambers,” it finally chimed, and the door emitted a sturdy clunk.

Vik gave the handle a yank and it sighed open with a familiar, invisible cloud of slightly chilled air. She gave an involuntary shudder as she stepped through, the door clicking shut behind her on its pneumatic elbow. The short hall she found herself in felt oddly comforting every time she found herself standing in it, job or no job. Heights, she couldn’t handle. Elevators, which served no purpose in her mind beyond dangling their occupants over a vertical chasm, even less so.

Cold Storage was none of those things. It always felt comfortable to her. Cozy. Safe. No one came down here who wasn’t scheduled to be down here. There were never interruptions. No surprises. Nobody to hammer at the door demanding she don a uniform she didn’t want for a cause she didn’t believe in. Down in the chilled air at the bottom of CryoLife, Vik could truly relax.

She passed the empty break room, really just a broom closet with a refrigerator and a table to sit at, and made the short walk past the floor-to-ceiling marketing posters covering the wall. They were there not for her, but for the rare instances when an investor might be invited down for a tour. Vik glanced up at a blown up smiling face of an elderly stallion seated in a rocking chair with his family… or possibly his descendants? The background was a generic farmhouse porch, so she assumed it wasn’t supposed to depict the distant future. Another displayed a team of doctors gathered around a steel cylinder, all smiling hopefully as if they were getting ready to break the seal. The majority of the posters were less direct. Pastoral scenes of an Equestrian mountain range. Indistinct ponies silhouetted against an early morning sunrise as they fly fished in the water of a slow moving river. Canterlot Castle after a summer shower.

To the casual observer it was all very reassuring and futuristic. Vik had smiled on as a prospective customer once made the tour, being pushed along in her wheelchair as her hazy eyes marveled at the maze of pipes that snaked their way overhead and the bright silver double doors at the end of the hall. Vik had been glad she hadn’t asked about those silver doors because there was nothing science fictiony or fantastical about them. They opened up to a simple freight elevator large enough for a gurney and a few tenders. It had two stops: here and the weather enclosure tucked away at the back of the building. It was the part nobody really liked to think about, which is why they were trained to divert visitors from the elevator to the more impressive security door on the left.

This time Vik didn’t need to prompt Millie. She swatted a button beside the steel slab and stepped over the threshold after it had lifted clear. As it hissed shut behind her a voice echoed across the field of stainless steel cylinders.

“You’re late, slacker!”

She welcomed the first sincere smile since she woke up. “Fuck you, Pike,” she called back.

In the short time it took her to walk from the stairwell to Cold Storage her body had adjusted to the slightly below comfortable temperature. Her grin widened even more as she spotted Pike, wrapped up in his insulated CryoLife jacket, as he wheeled out onto the central walkway between the rows of cylinders. One of the casters under his office chair squeaked indignant protest at being treated as a conveyance, but Vik knew Pike would sooner stop kicking himself along the polished concrete than he would shave off his meticulously tended mohawk.

“Dare to dream, dare to dream,” he mock lamented, “but you are a dragon and I but a mere stallion, and oh, what would our parents think?”

She smirked at that as he rolled to her, and grabbed the back of his chair with a grunt of effort. Mere stallion my pale ass, she thought as she proceeded to wheel him past the storage rows and toward their shared office, I’d be willing to bet there’s a rock golem somewhere in your family tree.

Pike held up his hind hooves as she ferried him along, though he stopped short of yelling, “Whee!” The big oaf was the type of person who could enjoy his existence even if he were forced to pick up trash every morning, and it was infectious. If there were a part of her that had any attraction toward ponies, and if she didn’t harbor a little unspoken discomfort for all he’d sacrificed to get her back on her feet when she arrived here, she might have taken a pass at him by now.

“You know you don’t get paid more for coming in early,” she lectured, less out of concern and more out of tradition. This was how most days started for them. His unabashed positivity, her heatless remonstration. It was so ingrained between them that she was already mouthing the words to his response when he spoke.

“You get paid?” He followed that with an upturned grin, the bristles of his mohawk brushing her chest as he did so. She glanced down at him with an arched brow, and she could tell by his expression he would eyeball her all day until she said her line.

She sighed, smiling. “A handsome salary.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “They give you celery? I get paid–”

“Peanuts,” they finished together, and the shit eating grin he wore made the pun worth enduring.

It was stupid and corny, yes, but all their little rituals were stupid and corny. It was part of why she hadn’t been able to brush Pike off when he first made his offer to help her out years ago, back when she was being treated at the hospital across the street for exhaustion and he’d been a nursing student with his heart set on becoming a doctor. He’d heard about her story, understood better than Vik that nobody was going to stick their necks out for a refugee dragon for the time it would take for her to truly get back on her feet, and made his case to her when it came time to change out her IV bag.

Charity was a dirty word where Vik came from, and she’d been sorely tempted to throw his offer back in his face… but she hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. Pike had an almost childlike optimism that had nothing to do with naivety, and he hadn’t been pushy about it either. Just a place to stay until she got settled and found work, no strings attached, no obligations, as long as she followed some basic house rules.

She’d accepted, not without some rules of her own. Two days later, she was sleeping on the couch of his apartment. Two weeks later, the hospital found out their living arrangement and booted Pike from the nursing program.

The office chair squeaked into the office with the pair of them grinning at their shared joke. The admins at Seaside Hospital could kick rocks. She gave Pike’s chair a final push, sending him lazily spinning toward the wall of green filing cabinets containing the patient records of CryoLife’s current stock of eighty-one extremely wealthy, extremely dead corpsicles. A single bench-style desk ran the length of the office beneath an unbroken window that looked out onto the range of gleaming cylinders. Vik pulled out the remaining empty seat at the desk just as Pike rebounded across the office, rolling up beside her with a cylinder of his own presented to her.

“Freshly brewed this morning,” he intoned importantly as she took the battered green thermos from where it hovered within the gold haze of his magic, “from beans harvested in the high mountains of Whoknowsthefuckwhere, known only by connoisseurs and adventures until…”

“...you bought it from the coffee aisle of the Dash n’ Go and dumped a scoop in that ancient coffee maker that you refuse to wash,” she finished.

It earned her a reproachful look from Pike even as she uncapped the thermos and took a long, lavish sniff of the steam that rose from within. “Heathen,” he said.

She winked at him and brought the thermos to her lips, watching him wince a little as she took a generous swig. She may not have a horn with which to cast magic and her wings may only be good for brief, terrifying flights… but she had yet to meet a pony who could spit literal fire, and the physiology that made that possible also happened to make her species that much less bothered by little things like extreme heat.

She held the scalding coffee in her mouth for several wonderful seconds before finally swallowing. The chilled air served to turn her breath into a roiling plume of steam that flowed over her snout and stole a genuine chuckle out of Pike, who took the thermos back for a delicate sip of his own.

For several minutes they sat together, enjoying each other’s company while they dosed up on caffeine and stared out toward the sterile rows of intricately plumbed cylinders. There were five hundred of them in total, twenty rows of twenty-five, and less than a fifth of them were in use. CryoLife promised that as they found more customers and filled more of those coffins there would be salary increases on the horizon, and possibly more vacation pay. It was something to look forward to, Vik thought as she took her turn at the thermos, but nothing she would bet her future on. Things were stable right now, and that was good, but seeing the defeat on Pike’s face when he came to the apartment after finding out he’d been fired had taught her not to spend bits she didn’t have. Landing these jobs at CryoLife had been dumb luck and little else. Had the company chosen not to expand when it had, they might both be out on their asses looking for handouts instead of just Vik.

“Anything on the docket for today beyond the same-old?” she asked once her belly felt just warm enough to warrant cutting back on the coffee, lest she regret it.

Pike rested the thermos in his lap, a gesture Vik sometimes had to pull her eyes away from, and offered a one-shouldered shrug in response. “Nothing major. Cylinder 19 was throwing a code this morning.”

“Ms. Birchwood? She’s always throwing a code,” she demurred. “Engineering needs to come down here and fix that valve. Every time I have to force it I feel like it’s going to break off.”

“The work order says they have a replacement coming in soon,” he offered with a so there’s that grunt. “It wasn’t the valve this morning, though. Just a temperature fluctuation. Probably a seal going bad.”

“Work order?”

“Work order,” he agreed.

Neither of them were engineers. Somewhere in their employee files there was a pleasantly neutral corporate job title beneath their names, though it hadn’t been important enough for either of them to commit to memory. Something-something-liason? Vik couldn’t dredge it up, but if she had to make up a title she supposed she would go with Executive Freezer Attendant or Corpsicle Monitoring Associate. Their job amounted to keeping an eye on the terminals on the desk in front of them and verifying any problems reported by the software built into the cylinders. Technically their job could be done by Millie, but leaving a stockpile of wealthy, frozen corpses to the whims of a Robronco product - especially when several of those corpses had invested heavily in Robronco’s direct competitors - hadn’t passed the smell test during market testing. Cheaper to pay a couple people to mind the graveyard than risk scaring away potential new clients.

She watched Pike reach a hoof out to his terminal, which currently displayed an empty queue of complaints from the cylinders, and carefully tap the keys with its wide edge. His fetlocks, much like the rest of his coat, were a shade of straw she thought was interesting. Most ponies were more colorful, literally, bearing colors from midnight blue to painfully pink. Pike’s coloration was much more subdued. Hues of dry soil and dust, and a singular stripe of deep brown that ran through the center of his mane and tail. He enjoyed trimming the lighter edges of his short mohawk into patterns which that chocolate stripe could stand within. It was strangely charming even if little of it had been a choice he’d made. Just a roll of the genetic dice, and Vik couldn’t help but think he’d gotten a better roll than most.

And yet he insisted on mashing keys with his hooves.

“Don’t judge me,” he said, catching her glance as he henpecked buttons intended for a pegasus’s feathers. “I’m getting pretty good at this.”

She chose not to pick on him - he really was getting better - and watched the screen flip from the notification scroll to the slightly shaky footage of something flaming through the early morning sky. At the bottom of the screen the headline read, “JSA ROCKET CARRIES CREW TO ORBIT.”

Vik glanced at her own terminal to verify the notification queue was still visible. CryoLife didn’t care if they watched a little TV on the job, provided they at least gave the impression they were still doing a job.

“Did you watch the launch?” he asked, leaning forward to fiddle with the volume. Tinny speakers built into the terminal’s chassis whispered with the conversation of two off-camera news anchors.

“Somehow I slept right through it.” She feigned a look of regret that was as genuine as a penguin nesting in a volcano, then pointed a claw at the replay of the launch. “I’m guessing it didn’t blow up.”

He sat back in his chair, eliciting a creak from somewhere in its base. “I don’t see an EASA logo on the side, do you?”

“Ouch.” She always felt a tiny thrill whenever Pike threw barbs at the Equestrian government’s attempt at competing with JetStream Aerospace. There were certain things one didn’t say, even as it was becoming increasingly evident that Equestria was going to win the war against their zebra enemy. After a pause, she added, “So, they’re actually up there right now?”

Pike glanced at her with a touch of pride in his eyes. “Yeah. First ponies in space. JSA says the solar collector they’ve been building should be done with this launch. You see the pictures of the mirror array they built in the Badlands?”

Vik had seen enough pictures of that gaudy construction to fill a scrapbook. Apparently it had been all over the newspapers in the year Vik arrived in Equestria, but she’d been so overwhelmed with culture shock that it blended in with the rest of the noise. Now it was back on magazine covers and topping articles with the launches of JSA’s wild venture into solar harvesting, which promised to open the relief valve on the resource shortage that caused the war in the first place.

Her personal feelings were that JSA was promising a parade and would disappoint its diehard fans with a few under-decorated floats. But she’d always had a touch of cynicism in her and knew this wasn’t the time to shake it out of its cage.

“Hard to believe so much has changed since I was a hatchling,” she murmured.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “When I was growing up I thought my best prospects would be pulling lumber wagons with the earth ponies. That, or pulling out my mane trying to keep the family store afloat. My grandma would lay an egg if the nurses ever took her outside for a walk.”

The family business, Pike once told her, had been a small dry goods store situated near the docks where barge workers would sometimes spend their bits on staple goods and a few novelty carvings made by his father. It had closed its doors long before Pike ever had a chance to be badgered into inheriting it, something he admitted had come as a huge relief.

As for his grandmother, she’d apparently come down with a case of what dragons back home called “the forgetting” and what the modern pony called dementia. The topic was something of a sore spot for Pike and one which Vik had learned never to pry into when he sometimes mentioned his elder’s decline out of hand. Her decision not to take Uplift, the flowers and sunshine brand name of Maiden Pharmaceutical’s wonder drug which supposedly halted and sometimes reversed the progression of dementia, had driven a wedge between him and much of his own family. Pike wanted his grandma, the mare who essentially raised him, to remember who he was. The rest of his clan wanted him to honor her decision. It was tricky territory, and not the kind Vik knew how to navigate.

They settled into a comfortable silence as the news cycled through the morning headlines. Updates from the war trickled through in snippets. An Equestrian soldier died trying to defend a comrade whose power armor malfunctioned during a firefight. The Vhannan ambassador read an unconvincingly hopeful statement summarizing progress made between himself and the Equestrian Minister of Peace. As usual, there was nothing in the news about the hundred thousand or more dragons who had been sent to reinforce the Vhannan rearguard. She wondered if the story would be different if they could tune into a zebra-run channel, but she knew better than to seek out bad news. Odds were good she’d find more than she wanted.

Eventually the anchors would turn back to the developing story above all their heads. Cloudbreaker and its crew were making steady progress toward the incomplete solar station with the final pieces it required. What those components were remained a mystery to everyone who wasn’t intimately involved with the SOLUS project, but most of the big newspapers openly suspected the satellite was going to be powered by the same revolutionary mass arcane storage talismans, or M.A.S.T.s, which had become the keystone to the Equestrian war machine.

It was that same technology that warmed the cores of Equestrian’s new balefire bombs, and the ministries were making no effort to disassociate those frighteningly destructive weapons from their energy producing cousins. If there had ever been public support behind utilizing talismans to solve the developed world’s energy crisis, it died away the moment the first bomb turned several acres of Equestrian desert to radioactive glass. Harnessing free energy from the latent magic that permeated the globe sounded great right up until people started talking about building a talisman power plant in their backyard.

“...short hours, we will begin seeing live footage of Cloudbreaker docking to the outer hull of SOLUS. Once the shuttle is secure, JSA CEO Jet Stream will watch with the rest of Equestria as his daughter, Mission Specialist Apogee Stream…”

Pike groaned. “It’s just Apogee. Fuck’s sake.”

Vik murmured sympathetically. The young mare had been cursed with her parents’ love for scientific terminology, and Equestrian media had chosen to buffer the confusing nonword of a name by tacking on her father’s surname. It was one of those hamfisted attempts to solve a problem by creating a new one, but Vik suspected it bothered Pike and space enthusiasts like him more than it annoyed the mare grinning in the mission photo currently on the screen.

She glanced up at the wall clock and grunted. “Did you finish the morning checklist?”

Pike only just managed to suppress a wince. Now that he was engrossed with the JSA launch, the very obviously incomplete sheet clipped to the board on the desk between them loomed like an accusation.

“I got it.” She scooped up the clipboard, bopped it against Pike’s mohawk as she stood from her chair, and tipped him a knowing expression when he looked up at her with a mixture of apology and thanks. “Let me know if they spot a flying saucer up there. Be back in a minute.”

A minute turned into thirty a little faster than she’d expected, but such were the sacrifices made in the holy name of The Checklist. Or, in Vik’s case, checklists plural.

Normally they would split the drudgery between them and knock it out over the course of conversation, but with Pike’s attention cemented to the terminal there wasn’t much chance of that happening today. It wasn’t much of a chore to shrug off the faint irritation she felt at that because today just wasn’t an ordinary day. There were ponies in space, and though Vik would be lying if she said she shared the sense of national pride currently saturating Equestria right now she would be hard pressed to admit she wasn’t a little excited. After all, it was space travel… or at least space hitchhiking. Either way, it was nothing to sniff at.

She tongued the eraser of the pencil held gingerly between her teeth as she toggled through Cylinder 63’s diagnostic display. She mumbled to herself as she did this, a habit that always helped keep her mind on task as the work threatened to numb the thinking parts of her anatomy.

“Patient… Foggy Fleece. Temp minus three seventy five. Water-ice at…” she squinted at the readout, “zero point zero nine percent. Storage time, nine hundred and two days. Today’s date, October 31st, 1077. You get all that, Mills?”

A pause. “Yes, Miss Chambers. Data is verified.”

She plucked the pencil from her mouth and ticked the box. “I told you to stop calling me that.”

“Then don’t call me Mills.”

Vik blinked and searched the maze of conduits and plumbing overhead until she spotted the nearest of Millie’s hemispheric black eyes. Ever since she started working at CryoLife, Millie stubbornly insisted on addressing her as Miss Chambers or, if a subtle introduction was needed for someone accompanying her, the more dreaded Veridian Chambers. She was pretty sure the dragon in charge of assigning names on the day her egg got dumped on the government’s doorstep had been pointing to random crap in their office when her turn had come. To this day she had no clue who that dragon was, but if she ever found out she’d take the first boat back home to blacken their eye. Vik had several “chambers” and not a damn one of them was green.

She’d taken it upon herself to pare that ungainly mouthful first down to Vik the moment she realized nobody was going to stop her. Only, she never got around to changing it legally.

That, she decided, wasn’t important. What was important was that Millie had just backsassed her.

“I always call you Mills,” she protested warily.

“Yes,” Millie confirmed, and said nothing more.

She frowned at the unblinking lens, half expecting the artificial assistant to prompt her to finish the checklist so they could pretend this momentary awkwardness hadn’t happened, but it continued to regard her in silence.

“Hey, Pike?” she called loud enough where she was sure he’d hear from the office.

After a beat, he called back. “What’s up?”

She tapped the pencil thoughtfully against the checklist, and decided she wasn’t about to gift wrap and deliver a reason for him to harp on her for the next month. “How’re the space cadets doing? Anything new?”

“They completed the last major rendezvous maneuver a few minutes ago.” Then he added a quick, “And no, nothing exploded.”

She smirked and stepped over to the next cylinder. He knew her too well. “How long until they get there?”

Barely any hesitation. Pike had been tracking anything to do with JSA since they were blowing up prototype rockets on the launchpad. He would have the flight plan memorized, if not a printed copy open on their desk. “ETA one hour, twelve minutes. How’re the checklists coming? Need me to help?”

She would sooner be the reason he missed televised history than she’d kick a puppy. He’d owe her, sure, but he could owe her tomorrow. “I’ve got the population report mostly done and that’s it, so sit your butt down.”

With a final glance toward Millie’s camera, she started scrolling through the diagnostics for Cylinder 64. Seventeen supercooled coffins and a little more than half an hour later she checked the empty box for Cylinder 81 and put the occupied block of Cold Storage behind her. As she stepped out into the walkway connecting their shared office to the over engineered slab leading to the hallway, she considered the four hundred and nineteen room temperature cylinders. She sketched a quick V beside the line for Cylinder 65 and proceeded to draw a line from it down the page, continuing it onto the next sheet as she started for the hallway.

“I’m going to grab something from the vending machines,” she called over her shoulder. “Want anything?”

An enthusiastic ooh emanated from the office behind her and she tried not to roll her eyes when he requested Sparkle-Cola. Backtracking down the single hallway, she dragged her fingertips across the framed company ads and listened to the rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump of their passage. The silver elevator doors she habitually avoided gleamed at her with ominous invitation, and once again she suspected there was something fundamentally defective with the brains of people who willingly shuffled into those confined little public coffins.

Probably the same defect that gets people into the frozen ones you stare at every day, a voice in her head offered.

She grunted at that, then let the errant thought fade as she dipped into the walk-in closet that CryoLife called a break room. On the far wall, which wasn’t very far at all, a pair of vending machines stood shoulder to shoulder beside the same strip of countertop and cabinetry that appeared in low budget apartments across the planet. A round wooden table and a pair of plastic chairs took up the rest of the space. As far as Vik knew, nobody she worked with actually used the break room beyond snack runs. The windowed office back in Cold Storage was easily twice as large, plus who could relax in a room where the walls were decorated with corkboard and corporate policy reminders?

The beverage machine chirped when she swiped her laminate over the reader and she punched the button for Pike’s alicorn-branded soda. She considered the options more closely after plucking up the glass bottle, her thumb idly sliding over the chilled glass as she thought. The choices hadn’t changed since she started working here and if she was being honest with herself, the sweet tea she’d grown accustomed to was starting to feel a little boring. She remembered there was a gas station down the road that sold coffee, but with flavors in it, and they were supposedly–

She snapped herself out of dreamland, thumped a button at random, and grimaced at the result as she carried the second bottle to the snack machine. A minute later she was padding back down to Cold Storage with drinks and a pair of chocolate snack cakes in tow.

“Apogee, Control. O2 flow check.”

“Control, I see O2 flow showing nominal.”

Pike fumbled toward the desk with his magic until he felt it flowing over the half-empty bottle of Sparkle-Cola. He brought it to his lips and took an absent pull of the sweet yet sharply flavored soda, easily his favorite of the six varieties the ministers were marketing, without once letting his eyes leave the nine by nine inch terminal display.

“That was my bottle,” Vik began to protest, but he shushed her with a hurried wave of his hoof. He didn’t notice the arch expression she shot him, nor did he notice when she leaned over and snatched what had been his bottle from the desk and drained it in a long, defiant pull. The drama that was playing out live on televisions across Equestria was too important - too historic - to be interrupted.

On the terminal, grainy black and white footage showed Apogee’s suited hoof reach for the valve wheel in front of her. This was happening in space right now, he reminded himself, and the thought sent a triumphant shiver through him. Jet Stream’s daughter, the mission specialist many dismissed as a publicity stunt or a flagrant case of nepotism, twitched her foreleg and took a static-muffled breath as the articulating digits built into her EVA suit’s hoof extended to grip the textured wheel. His chair creaked as he leaned forward even more. He’d seen diagrams of JSA’s flight suits in the engineering magazines he had subscriptions for and yet it still amazed him to see those jointed metal fingers close around and begin to turn that airlock valve. Somewhere behind the camera, Apogee was using the feathers enclosed in her suit to manipulate the controls for those fingers, and not for the first time Pike marveled at the imagination it had taken to develop such an elegant solution to a seemingly insurmountable barrier.

“Seals look good. I have you down to eight point one psi, Apogee.”

The mission commander’s voice, Spearhead. If he’d ever been jealous of Apogee’s fame outshining his chance at the spotlight, he’d never shown it. The stallion was up there for the mission and the mission alone.

Beside him, Vik set her heels up on the desk and picked the chocolate icing off the snack cake in her lap. Despite himself, Pike couldn’t stop his eyes from flicking down to the spot where the girth of Vik’s tail met the cleft of her buttocks. It wasn’t a completely unpleasant view despite their difference in species, which was admitting a lot for a stallion who up until just a year ago harbored no interest in her beyond casual friendship. Odds were he was thinking with his dick, and when he told himself so his brain cut off the unwanted hormone dump and allowed the glimpse of Vik’s slightly upturned rump to fade from his thoughts.

“...mobility is nominal. Pressure reads zero poi–”

Static fogged the terminal and Pike sat bolt upright in dismay. Mercifully, it cleared a moment later.

“...onfirm go to disengage outside airlock.”

“Apogee, Control. You are go for EVA.”

The soft rush of a sigh across her helmet microphone. “Here goes.”

The pair of them watched as Apogee pulled down on a handle inside a silent airlock save for the sound of her own breathing, then turned toward the outer door and pushed. The titanium lid swung into the void and Pike sucked in a sharp breath as the camera floated out after it.

As Apogee moved beyond the confines of her lifeboat, the haze of static which plagued the footage cleared.

Vik reached down for the last crumbs of her snack cake and found she’d already eaten them. Part of her wanted to steal Pike’s unopened dessert but she was too enraptured by what she was seeing to give it any real thought. This wasn’t just idle talk or launchpad test footage anymore, this was actually happening! At some point she’d given up trying to suppress her grin and now they were both leaning toward the tiny screen, nearly shoulder to shoulder as they marveled over what they were watching.

The spacemare was currently walking across the skin of SOLUS, pausing occasionally to check on her tethers or untangle her oxygen line. It was like watching someone clomp along the seafloor in a diving suit, except for the fact that every few minutes an entire planet would roll into view. This, more than anything, Vik wished Apogee would stop to look up at more often. All of everything, the entirety of all known life in the universe, was right there above that spacefarer’s head. Seeing it there gave her a sense of profound wonder that she understood would take her days to even begin to articulate, and yet what must it be like to the ponies up there right now seeing it with their own eyes?

The terminal’s speaker crackled with idle conversation being broadcast the world over. Apogee was talking to her commander about his family. Vik didn’t catch much of it. Apparently he had gryphons roosting in his family tree, someone named Tawny. They were about as awestruck at the globe turning over their heads as Vik was about their mission. Well maybe that wasn’t strictly fair. Apogee had been gushing about being out there in the vacuum barely five minutes ago, but it had felt like she’d hardly given the people watching her helmet footage any time to admire the view!

Currently, Apogee was standing over a squarish panel with the aid of the magnets built into the hooves of her EVA suit. Three of her legs were secure to the satellite while she used her notably dragonlike mechanical fingers to open the panel. She had done this five times before and yet Vik wasn’t quite sure what exactly she was doing. Whoever was anchoring the live broadcast wasn’t narrating and there were no headline banners to explain. Once the panel was open, Apogee’s fingered hoof dipped from view and reappeared with a familiar, faceted piece of hexagonal obsidian but which she assumed was one of the M.A.S.T. talismans Pike said they were up there to install.

“Do us proud, little star,” Apogee murmured, and the six inward-pointing tines which the hatch shielded seemed to reach out and snatch the talisman away with invisible force like they had the others. “Unit 6 in place. How’s it looking?”

“All units are online and nominal. Return to the shuttle and standby.”

“Copy. Making my way back now.”

They watched Apogee secure the hatch and turn in the direction she’d come, following the stiff trail of her oxygen line around the satellite’s cylindrical form. It seemed like that was it. Seeing Pike relaxing a little in his chair seemed to confirm it. The show was over. Nothing left now except the closing credits and commercials. He met her eyes for a moment, then offered a smile that bordered on exhaustion. For once, she knew how that felt.

Never known for her speechcraft, she said, “That actually happened.”

“Ponykind is officially a spacefaring civilization,” he said with a touch more gravitas, then glanced at their empty cola bottles with amused disappointment. “What’s the alcohol policy here again? I feel the need to toast.”

She leaned forward and picked up her empty, then tilted it toward him to be clinked. His magic lifted his own off the desk, a tiny puddle of caramel liquid still swirling at the bottom. Then he just held it there. Vik blinked, then decided he was waiting for her to do the honors and reached out to tap his bottle with hers. The office echoed with the soft tink of glass and the unmistakable tone of worry in the voice coming from the terminal. Pike was staring at the screen, his expression a mask of concern, their toast forgotten almost as soon as it had been proposed. Vik had to think back to the last thing she remembered Apogee saying while the two of them were talking.

“Control, Apogee,” the mare had said, her voice tight. “I’m feeling a vibration.”

There had been no immediate response, and that ominous silence was what had pulled Pike back to the broadcast. Now Apogee was sounding truly ill at ease.

“Control, Apogee. Please copy.”

More silence, and Vik thought she heard real pleading in that please copy. Seconds passed. The world slowly descended back into the mare’s field of view.

Then, from the planet overhead, not the Cloudbreaker, a voice spoke. “Apogee, Control. We have a situation.”

It wasn’t difficult to make out the background noise of mission control or the raised voices calling for calm. Pike murmured a curse that was probably only meant for his ears.

“Apogee, Control. We need…” A pause, then a wet noise like someone swallowing to clear a dry throat. “Can you see Cloudsdale from your position?”

There was a stretch of time when nothing happened. Apogee was still walking, she’d never stopped making her way back to the shuttle, but it was as if the rest of her body had stopped working. The request from ground control was just too much of a non sequitur for anyone experiencing the marvel of space for the first time to latch onto, at least not immediately. Then the camera swiveled around as if the mare had momentarily lost her bearings before panning up to the vast expanse of planet dangling above her.

Equestria’s eastern coastline of Equestria hadn’t yet crested the planet’s horizon, but enough of the continent had for a casual observer to identify familiar landmarks. Buckskin Bay was too small to make out but the dense evergreen forest that dominated the country’s northwest corner was impossible to miss. There was the jagged mountain range which drew the border between Equestria and the Crystal Empire, a nation so rich in natural quartz formations that the name became unavoidable. There was Las Pegasus on the west coast and Manehattan and Fillydelpha on the east, the geography around each so irreversibly changed by industry that they resembled gravel piles in a field of grass.

In the center of Equestria stood Canterlot Mountain, a geographical anomaly atop which the nation’s capital had been carved into the side of. And there, always northwest of that lone mountain, was the perpetual bank of clouds which formed the foundation for Equestria’s largest and oldest community of pegasi: Cloudsdale.

Only where that city should have been, there was an expanding dome of sickly green light.

Apogee’s mic captured a breathless, “Oh no.”

The dome grew, dimming to black as the light within it went out. As soon as it did, a second flash appeared.

Las Pegasus, she thought. That was Las Pegasus.

A third. Apogee’s breathing ratcheted up. She was saying something to ground control and the response was garbled, cutting in and out with bursts of static. Like listening to the radio in a lightning storm.

“Vik.” Pike’s voice, urgent.

A pulse of white farther north of Las Pegasus, almost halfway between it and Buckskin Bay, resolved into its own pale green mushroom cloud. The dark ring that expanded beneath it rolled inland while seemingly leaving the ocean untouched. Because there is nothing on the water to burn, that little voice in her head whispered.

Pike was shaking her shoulders now. Someone was yelling at Apogee to get to the airlock but before she could respond the video feed cut out. The TV station’s newsdesk was on camera now but the anchors were nowhere to be seen. One of them must have still been wearing their mic because Vik could hear the muffled breathing and heavy hoofbeat of someone running. An instant later the screen jerked, emitted an abortive shriek, and the snow of a lost signal hissed out from the terminal.

She spoke as if in a dream. “What was that? What were those–”

Pike wrenched her around in her chair until their eyes met. He’d gone pale despite the buckwheat shade of his coat. “Bombs!” he shouted loud enough to wrench her back to reality. “We need to go! Get up! Run!”

Go where? she wanted to ask, but he shoved her out of her chair and toward the office door before she could put it to words. Her first steps were sluggish and unsure, and clearly infuriating to a stallion who was accepting the reality of what was happening topside more quickly than she was. He was ahead of her now, his magic yanking at her arm as she stumbled past the rows of corpsicles in their silver coffins.

She could hear thunder, she realized. Five floors underground and she could hear thunder. And she realized, with dawning horror, that it was resonating through the floor beneath her feet. A deep, visceral vibration as if she were standing on the surface of a bell the size of a continent and something titanic had set to hammering.

Somewhere in the building someone pulled a fire alarm. Along with the deafening peel of overhead sirens, Millie’s voice boomed overhead. “A FIRE HAS BEEN DETECTED IN THE BUILDING. PLEASE EVACUATE THROUGH THE LOBBY. A FIRE HAS BEEN DETECTED IN THE BUILDING. PLEASE EVACUATE THROUGH THE LOBBY.”

She was following Pike now and when he came to a faltering stop in the hallway she nearly crashed into him. His eyes were wide, his mouth gaping as he took deep gulps of chilled air, his entire body resonating a primal fear Vik had never seen in him before.

This is what people look like when they’re sure they’re about to die, that unwelcome voice said. If you had a mirror, you’d see it on your face too.

He was looking at the freight elevator, its illuminated button glowing a foreboding red. Out of service. Millie had disabled them when the fire alarm was pulled, and Vik felt an inappropriate sense of gratefulness to whomever had set it off. She’d rather die on the stairs than in that elevator.

Their momentary pause lasted all of two seconds before Pike was dragging her down the hall to the stairwell door. Thunder clapped overhead again and this time it didn’t resemble natural thunder at all. It thudded in their chests, heavy and hard, like the bomb it was. Before she could begin to ask herself what Buckskin Bay - a nowhere town hundreds of miles away from anything close to a major city - had to offer as a bombing target, she was being hauled up the first flight of stairs toward a downward rushing stampede of shouting, screaming office workers. Vik could see them pouring around the railing through the open shaft running through the stairwell and felt a combined sense of dread and relief to see most of the flood pressing out through the lobby exit.

Still, there were at least two dozen or more ponies making their way down past the sublevel landings toward Vik and Pike. They milled along the railing, watching the spectacle of the evacuation overhead with numb wonder, obviously torn between heading further down the steps or joining the main crowd fleeing the building.

Vik understood why they were unsure. When it came to evacuation policies, CryoLife never minced words in its regular reminders of the slim chance that if the building were ever damaged, any one of the lines carrying refrigerant to Cold Storage could break and a power cut could disrupt Millie’s atmospheric sensors. Liquid nitrogen was only one of several coolants the company kept stored on site, and those which rose would asphyxiate just as readily as those which settled into the sublevels. CryoLife might be an eccentric company to work for, but their corporate lawyers were not about to let a minor earthquake turn a cracked foundation into a heap of wrongful death suits.

“Go up!” Pike hollared as they passed the first lingerer on the stairs. “Get out! Get out!”

Soon they were both shouting, Pike wrenching at the shoulders of stunned workers and Vik hooking her hand around the foreleg of a wide-eyed mare and yanking her around to face up the steps they were climbing. As they did, the stragglers began to follow in a worried trail behind them.

What felt like an instant later, Vik and Pike were shoving themselves into the crush of bodies on the lobby landing, the breath stolen from their lungs as they were vomited out onto a marbled floor which less than two hours ago had been the picture of professional tranquility. She found Pike in the stumbling mass of stampeding hooves, grabbed a fistful of mane at the base of his neck, and kept hold of him as they jostled and pushed their way to the row of glass doors across the lobby. She could hear the lonely wail of klaxons outside, their howls crisp and mournful beyond doors which had been thrown open with such force that their panes lay in glittering confetti on the sidewalk.

The sound of sirens and cracking thunder reminded her of the storms which sometimes rolled over her home island. They had been black, churning monstrosities that came out of the horizon like a living thing bent on drowning them all. In the morning they would find palm trees shattered and still smoking, the embers of lightning strikes still glowing deep within their trunks. This was just like one of those storms, only there was no lightning and the sky was still a painfully vibrant blue.

For just a moment, as she and Pike clambered through the lobby doors and crunched over the glass pebbled sidewalk, she convinced herself that this was all just a big mistake. And she could tell, as she looked around at the townspeople standing dumbly in the middle of the road with them that they were all hoping the same thing. There were no mushroom clouds rising into the sky. No fire sweeping out of the forest to burn them up. The noise could just as easily be something else. A gas explosion. A demolition nobody had told them about. Wasn’t there such a thing as meteors which fell from space and exploded high up in the atmosphere? She’d read something about that once. There had been a forest found flattened in Yakistan that–

Vik and all the others gathered in the street turned to the north where the sky beyond the Crystal Mountains began to frantically pulse. It reminded her of the flashbulbs at a ministry press conference. First there was a beautiful blue sky, then a patch of it flickered, then blue again. It happened again and again along the line of mountains, seemingly at random, sometimes in pairs or trios. It rippled west to east like a line of unseen firecrackers, and Vik thought she saw something silver dart down behind one of those snow capped peaks right where one of those faintly emerald flickers bloomed.

Then she saw them. They all saw them.

Not the mushroom clouds they were all trained to fear. Not the boiling pillars of green fire the ministries recorded during the balefire bomb tests in the badlands. The citizens of Buckskin Bay watched in bewilderment as the very crystalline formations which gave the Crystal Empire its name, arced skyward from behind the mountains like a molten wave slamming against breakers stretching to the horizon.

They realized with stunned horror that those glowing projectiles were separating from one another, spreading out like a fan of tumbling magma that stood no chance of missing their town. Globules the size of houses seemed to float suspended overhead as they reached their apex. Then they began to fall.

None of them understood what they were seeing. Not enough to run. Not enough to take cover. They stood, staring and confused, until a drop of liquefied crystal the size of a gold bit splashed against the back of a mare several blocks away and set her to screaming as it seared her flesh. Then came another shriek of pain nearer by. And another. And more.

“Back inside,” she murmured.

The crowd in the streets was beginning to scatter, but Pike stood stone still. “What’s happening?”

Something heavy and liquid slammed into the hood of a carriage down the road, crushing the engine and sending a fan of sparks spraying into the ponies around it. Suddenly someone was screaming for everyone to get into the hospital building, and the harried milling of unguided panic began to take on a singular direction toward the white building across the road.

Vik jerked on Pike’s mane, hard enough to make him cry out in protest. She didn’t let up. “Get the fuck back inside,” she urged, pulling him back the way they came.

As he turned to follow a half-melted slab of crystal the size of a full grown pony detonated against the pavement hard enough to collapse the sewer line beneath it. Searing, stinking steam erupted from the fissure and Vik tried not to watch as several ponies tumbled into the scalding miasma.

“GO!” she screamed.

But by then, Pike needed no convincing. A pelting rain of superheated crystal was beginning to fall now and the stampede to the hospital had swept up all but a few stragglers out on the road. Vik had no intention of crossing the road and the hospital parking lot under that burning hailstorm when they were less than ten yards from the door they’d just come through. They scraped over the broken glass and back into the lobby where a trio from CryoLife’s accounting department, at least according to their laminates, stood in a huddle like rabbits cowering from a predator.

“Come on!” Pike shouted after them, but none of them moved.

“Everyone’s going to the hospital,” the mare among them said. “It’s safer there, right? A hospital?”

As if to answer their question, a block of smoking stone the size of a carriage slammed through the roof of the emergency room where earlier that morning Vik had avoided eye contact with its nursing staff. She realized, with stupid embarrassment, that she and Pike were still wearing their Cold Storage medical scrubs.

“We need to get…” Pike had slowed his run to a hurried walk, and Vik could see his expression shift as he understood he was saying exactly the wrong thing, “...downstairs. It’ll be safer belowground.”

The accountants didn’t move.

“Pike,” she insisted, pulling at him, “come on.”

He pulled back. “It’s not safe!”

And she saw the instant those words made up the accountants’ minds. It wasn’t safe downstairs. It wasn’t safe where the pipes might burst and invisible gas could rise or fall to suffocate them no matter where they were. They’d been trained not to shelter in the sublevels, and yet that was before they knew the bombs could scoop up the Crystal Empire and pour its molten slag on their heads.

Muffled thuds were hammering the sides of the building now. The debris was getting larger. Sparks and licks of flame were sheeting across the open lobby doorways as if a team of welders were hard at work outside. The rumbles of those distant detonations were finally reaching them now and even as dulled by the mountains as they were, they sent a bolt of primal fear through Vik’s spine.

“We can make it,” the mare said.

“You won’t,” Pike countered, but they both knew the words had fallen on deaf ears.

Something on one of the floors above them crashed across the ceiling. More smoking stones were clattering into the lobby.

The accountants met their eyes, silently inviting Vik and Pike to follow them to safety. Hospitals saved lives, after all. Then they were moving, galloping out into that burning hailstorm beneath a shield of magic cast by the unicorn among them. They regretted their decision before they’d crossed the road’s centerline. Vik couldn’t suppress a sick, mewling sound from rising in her throat as she saw the falling crystals pierce the shield as if it weren’t there at all and set fire to the bodies they touched. Their charge toward the hospital turned into a chaos of tumbling, spinning limbs as flames chased across their coats like lit tinder. One by one they fell, shrieking and kicking, until they were still.

“Vik,” a voice said. Pike’s voice.

He turned her chin away from the scene unfolding outside, and when she looked down at him she saw tears in his eyes. Tears that told her they weren’t going to survive this. That they might have bought themselves a little time, but not much. Not really. The sound of raining debris had become almost deafening now, loud enough to drown out even the thunder of the falling bombs.

The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “We’re going to die.”

Pike glanced toward the open doors where, to their shared dismay, the asphalt itself was beginning to burn. Most likely the CryoLife building was on fire. They could see smoke pouring through the windows of the hospital, where it wasn’t obscured by nearer flames. Finally, he nodded. No sense in denying the obvious.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice thick. “Yeah, I guess so. But maybe we don’t have to do it like…”

He gestured to the flames. Toward where they could still see the accountants burning, if either of them chose to look. They didn’t look.

“We should go back down,” he continued. “At least there we’ll have options.”

It made a kind of terrible sense. They might burn no matter what they do, but that didn’t have to happen while they were alive. She didn’t object. She just allowed herself to be led back to the stairwell, through a building which had emptied out into the path of a firestorm, and as the world outside blackened and burned they began an unhurried descent back to Cold Storage.

They had turned down the second landing when a piece of the Crystal Empire larger than Vik’s apartment crashed through the first floor and snapped two of the north supports like twigs. The building lurched, struck through its spinework of critical supports and deeper still.

It groaned in agony as rigid iron shifted, bent, then started to collapse.

Chapter 2: The Middle

October 31st, 1077
Day 1

“Vik.”

Pain. Her first thought upon coming to was of pain.

“Vik.”

Her face crumpled with the understanding that the discomfort was coming from her own head. A deep, pulsing throb right below the root of her swept back left horn. Instinctively she lifted a hand to touch it and sucked in a hissing curse when the faintest contact sent the nerves into a screaming fit.

“Vik, your immediate assistance is required. There is an emergency.”

She managed to crack one eye open and for a fleeting moment she expected to find herself laying in her bed back at her apartment, but when she tried to look around all she could see was cinder blocks and gray dust. Her mouth tasted like smoke, she thought. Smoke, or maybe the flavor of an unstruck matchstick. She had done her share of fire tricks to know the taste, but this had an acrid edge to it.

“Vik, your colleague requires medical attention. You must assist him.” A pause, and the stale yet familiar voice grew an unusual edge to it. “Veridian Chambers, you are conscious and mobile. Sit up now and help him.”

“Th’fucker you’m…” she winced again, her mouth and brain still far from synced up. “S’not my… ungh. Fuck.”

She rolled onto her back, sending a tinkling cascade of broken concrete and dusty paperwork tumbling off of her. She inhaled some of that acrid dust and it sent her into a racking, gagging fit of ugly coughs. It was agonizing, each convulsion priming her for the next, and it only ended when her jaws were caked in muddy spittle. She was in the stairwell, she realized, on one of the landings between descents. Gradually she began to piece together her last memories.

They had been fleeing down the steps as the very geography of the Crystal Empire fell flaming from the sky. She remembered the rapid flashes of bombs flicking down the mountain range like bulbs on a string of lights popping one after the other. The zebras hadn’t been satisfied with scouring Equestria from the map and had sent balefire into the heart of the Crystal Empire in spite of their declaration of neutrality. The bombs had folded up the far slopes of those mountains and propelled them into Equestria and Buckskin Bay had been caught in the crossfire.

She recalled hearing an explosion overhead and knowing one of those molten boulders had made a direct hit against the building. Then there had been a sound like standing inside of a tipped rainstick, only the corn kernels had been switched out with rubble. Pike had seen something coming, she didn’t know what, and he shoved her.

“Miss Veridian Chambers you will get up and you will render aid or I will recommend you for termination of employment this instant.”

Millie, she understood. Where was that accent from? Manehattan? Since when did Millie speak with an accent?

“I will not be left alone in here,” the artificial assistant pressed.

Pike had shoved her. Her thoughts kept coming back to–

“Pike,” she gasped, and pushed herself up with the flats of her palms.

Eyes stinging from the dust in the air she looked up the stairwell she’d fallen down and saw that the steps above had collapsed. Or rather it had been crushed into itself by the weight of the rubble further up. Where there had once been a channel of open air around which the stairwell wrapped itself, now there was a plug of tangled rebar and concrete.

It took her several seconds before she spotted the hoof and foreleg protruding from the edge of the rubble. He’d gotten maybe two or three steps down before the collapse caught and buried him. That was what he’d shoved her ahead of. He’d seen it coming and tried to save her.

“Oh my god,” she murmured, half crawling and half pulling herself up the rubble strewn steps.

She repeated it over and over again as she wrapped her fingers around his fetlocks, pulled, and discovered he wasn’t going anywhere with everything piled over him. A breath later she was attacking the rubble with a fury, prying her claws around anything that was loose, big or small, and throwing it behind her heedless of the danger. The concrete scree cascaded around her calves, cutting and scratching at the flesh beneath her scales as they went.

How long had she been out? Minutes? Hours? Pike might be built differently than her but she didn’t think even a full grown stallion could breathe with that much weight bearing down on him. How long could a pony hold their breath? She tried not to think about it and forced herself to focus on getting him out.

When she uncovered a block of concrete the size of a beach ball she jammed her forearms into the loose rubble around it until she was practically hugging the thing, wrenched back as hard as she could, and cried out when it and several feet of rubble came apart and went banging down the steps below. Before what was left could settle and compact she bent down, grabbed Pike’s foreleg and a hunk of his exposed mane, and hauled back as hard as her aching muscles would allow. Lithe as she may look, she knew she had muscle to throw around if it ever came to a knockdown dragout, and at that moment she didn’t hold back.

Confirmation that Pike hadn’t been smothered to death came in the form of his growing, insistent bellowing as he found himself being dragged free by his follicles. Between one moment and the next the rubble gave up its grip and Vik found herself stumbling backwards down the stairs with Pike tumbling along his belly after her. Somehow she managed to keep her balance, avoiding what would have been an unpleasant fall onto the jagged stones she’d sent piling up on the landing below. They came to a stop three quarters of the way down and before she knew it, she was kneeling with her arms around his neck.

“I thought you were dead,” she breathed, gallons of adrenaline suddenly finding themselves with nothing to do except make her shake like a leaf. “Are you okay? Millie said you were dead and I–”

“That is an exaggeration,” came a disembodied retort.

Not wanting to go full toboggan down the rest of the stairs, Pike risked lifting the hoof she’d recently dragged him by and patted the back of her wing. “Pretty sure… busted a few ribs. Did something to my hip too but… probably not broken. Help me up.”

He was breathing and speaking with ginger breaths now that he wasn’t screaming at her to stop, and to her relief he was able to carefully get himself onto his hooves. Blood was oozing from a deep gash across his left buttock, slicing a rough line through the stethoscope-wrapped red cross which had marked him since late colthood. She felt certain she was the cause of that wound and hoped it wouldn’t scar, assuming they survived long enough for that to be a problem.

A low groan rolled through the rubble plug overhead, sending fresh debris sifting and clanking down what remained of the emergency stairwell. When they looked up, Vik noticed water beginning to darken and drip off the disjointed slabs.

“There is a Class B first aid kit inside the employee break room on sublevel five,” Millie prodded.

Pike grunted and began to take unsteady steps down to the landing Vik had woken up on. The door leading out was partially open and buried in over a foot of loose rubble Vik had thrown down. The placard beside it denoted it as 4B - Maintenance. The next one down was 5B - Cold Storage. Her workplace. Her new home, as far as the dying world above was concerned. Very likely it would be the last place she saw alive.

As they picked their way over the maintenance floor landing, Pike wheezed a question. “How is… there still power?”

She kept a loose grip around his shoulder as they descended the next landing. “A fluke, I guess. Dumb luck.”

“There are two diesel-gas generators on the floor you just passed. Provided the fuel tanks beneath the employee parking lot behind the building have not been ruptured, electricity will remain available for…” a pause, “forty-one days. This assumes, of course, that the primary and secondary generators continue operating.”

“I guess–” Vik’s heel slipped off the next step causing her to land with a jarring thump on the next and giving Pike an unwelcome jostle. “I guess that answers that.”

“We need to find a way out of here,” Pike grumbled.

That felt premature, what with the world burning down above their heads.

“Find some help,” he continued. He was rambling now, and she let him do it. “There’s bound… to be survivors. At the hospital. If it’s still there. Equestrian Army will… be deploying. Ships, maybe. Why would they… bomb the mountains? Fucking stripes.”

She winced at the slur but said nothing in return. A minute ago he’d been buried alive and no doubt had adrenaline to spare. She suspected brushes with death had a tendency to expand one’s vocabulary, if for no other reason than she felt sorely tempted to pile on a few disparagements of her own. Until today she’d dismissed headlines rumoring that Vhanna had stolen the bomb as more thinly veiled Equestrian propaganda. Just more of the same fear mongering to ensure the scrap drives were plentiful and the war fervor high. Apparently she’d gotten it wrong.

“I hope we shot back,” he rumbled.

“Yeah.”

“I hope we turned that desert to glass.”

She nodded again, this time without the enthusiasm. “Yeah.”

They found the first aid kit exactly where Millie said it would be, and inside among the gauze, stitching supplies, and quick clotting powder, was a single bulky syringe bearing a stamped label along its silver side.

Maiden Pharmaceutical Inc.
StimPak Survival Syringe
One (1) Dose, Inject Anywhere

She could think of a few places she wouldn’t want a syringe this large being stuck but decided not to share that with Pike. She turned the StimPak over in her palm, noting the lack of a visible needle nor one in the kit to match it. Eventually Millie had stepped in to assure her that the needle was recessed into the cylinder and would spring out automatically once she pressed down on the plunger.

It gave a hiss of pressurized gas as it dumped its lifesaving cargo into Pike’s shoulder. She wasn’t sure where the right place to inject him was, so the shoulder it was. He winced but offered no other complaint. The both of them watched with shared wonder as the gash along his backside slowed its bleeding, then stopped entirely. Vik fought back a wave of nausea while she used her fingertips to press the wound closed. She could handle blood, but her experience with open wounds amounted to… well, none.

She suppressed a sudden urge to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. An apocalypse was unfolding above them and here she was crouching beside her friend and coworker feeling squicky about a deep cut. Something about that struck her as darkly funny and she wasn’t sure if that was just the first crack in a much larger mental break.

“How’s the rest of you?” she asked after she released the pressure on his skin and saw that the edges were already knitting back together with the Stimpak’s help.

Pike risked sitting down on the floor and taking a slow, tentatively deep breath. “Better, I think. Ribs are still fucked up. Probably takes longer for this stuff to work on bone. Might be sleeping on my back for a while. Are you hurt at all?”

“Just some bumps and bruises. I think something clipped my horn.” She risked touching the skin below it again, winced, then steadied her nerves as she ran her fingers down the downward sloping arc of one and then the other. No chips. No breaks. Good.

Bumps, bruises, and I can’t stop thinking about the people I saw burn alive, but I don’t think they make a Stimpak for that.

A muffled thump caused the walls around them to shudder. Another detonation nearby, or just one with enough kick that it made distance a moot point. They waited for what felt like hours, but which couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes, before they were certain the bombs had stopped falling. The silence that followed felt too fragile to disturb. They remained in the break room, eventually seating themselves shoulder to shoulder with the vending machines warming their backs, until the clock above the door swept past noon, then two o’clock, then past the time they would have normally punched out and gone to their respective homes.

Watching the minute hand tick past five o’clock and continue on made all of this feel suddenly real to Vik. The routine of living was broken. They couldn’t go home. Not with a whole building in ruins above them. Not with the world beyond it burned to the ground. In her heart of hearts she knew neither of them had a home to go back to. For Vik, that meant she’d lost her apartment. For Pike, she understood he’d just lost a lot more than an address and some thrift store kitchen cutlery. His whole family was in Buckskin Bay for the most part and odds were against any of them being the level of wealthy it took to secure a reservation with Stable-Tec.

When his stomach gave a discontented peel of hunger, Pike got to his hooves and faced the vending machine which had been his backrest. He remained quiet as he looked down at his laminate, hovering now in an unusually faint haze of his magic, then swiped it like they’d both done every day. The digital display issued three steady chirps and read no network. He closed his eyes, letting his laminate drop as his jaw worked back and forth for a second or two. Then he turned away and began walking toward the hallway door.

Vik started to push herself up when he stopped and said, “I just need a minute alone.”

“Okay,” she said, sitting back down. “I’m here if you… you know.”

She couldn’t tell if he’d suppressed a smile or a wince, but as she listened to his hoofsteps departing down the hall she heard him utter a hitching gasp that sent her own eyes misting over. She’d never seen him cry before. Even on his worst days, and with all the problems surrounding his ailing grandmother there had been many of them, he’d just get a little quiet. Now she was hearing that armor finally break, and the deep aching sounds of unmasked grief were as desolate as the ones she made during the dark nights when the pain of leaving her home was the sharpest.

She bore through those sounds as well as she could, then pushed off her knees and stepped out into the lonely hall. He was sitting in the fine gray dust that had fanned outside the stairwell door, his shoulder resting against the wall and his body slumped. He didn’t look up at her when she sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder. He just turned into her, pressed the slab of his head against her chest, and sobbed like a child who was lost and couldn’t find his parents.

Her vision swam as she rocked him back and forth, her voice crackling as she whispered, “I know. I know. I know.”

Only she didn’t. She hadn’t the first clue what they were going to do. She didn’t know if help was coming or if it would ever come. She had no idea if there was any point to helping themselves. What were they meant to do now? Bang on the walls with pipes? Scream into the rubble? Dig through it? Then what?

What good was survival when the world was over?

November 2nd, 1077
Day 3

“No one’s coming. We need to...”

Pike made a vague shrug. He spoke with the unmistakable hesitancy of a stallion who was teetering over a chasm of despair and thinking very hard about taking that final jump. All that was keeping him on this side of it was the not knowing. Not knowing if anyone else had survived. Not knowing if anyone was alive to rescue them. Not knowing if there was anywhere left to survive.

Vik watched him with open concern. They sat in the wide doorway of Cold Storage, where the steady chill of refrigeration wafted into the hall, each of them facing the other with their backs to either frame. They still wore their CryoLife scrubs, dirty and torn as they were, and as she held her bent legs to her chest and let her chin rest in the crook of her knees she chose not to admonish him for letting his eyes wander a little. Probably he wasn’t even aware he was staring. Just an empty gaze focused on something familiar. She had a pretty good feeling their professional relationship was done, anyways. No longer friends and colleagues, but friends and survivors.

She swept her upturned tail across the dusty floor, unwrapping herself on one side to curl around the other. “We have some time yet before the power gives out,” she offered.

He nodded, his eyes following the movement of her tail. “Maybe. Food and water, though…”

Water more than food, but she agreed with his point. The faucet in the break room was dead. If they wanted use of a toilet they would have to clear the stairwell rubble blocking sublevel four, and that was assuming the collapse hadn’t damaged anything critical up there. Distasteful as the thought was, they were probably going to need the water in those bathrooms for drinking more than they did to handle their necessaries. She hoped the maintenance crew had stowed away some uneaten lunches somewhere up there, because if they hadn’t Vik and Pike’s food options would be limited to chips and chocolate bars.

She sucked in a breath and puffed it out in a sigh, not relishing that version of her future. Not for the first time this morning, she let her gaze slip past Pike and down the hall toward the freight elevator. Neither of them had the courage yet to ask Millie to unlock the call button, its red eye still glowing at her from its wall plate. There was no question at all that the primary elevator back down by the stairwell was a lost cause - building collapses by definition meant bad news for any elevator shaft caught in the middle of them - but she didn’t think the freight elevator would have as much material piled on top of it compared to its centrally located cousin. As much as she hated to think about it, that elevator may very well be their only way out. What kept her from pressing that button was the fear of what they would learn when she did.

“Water, food, power,” she ticked off on her fingers, then extended a fourth and gave it a tap. “Communication. We’re going to need some way to contact the outside world.”

Pike shrugged. “There’s Millie.”

The voice which answered them was the same one that had hectored Vik back to consciousness yesterday on the stairwell. Stiffly formal and faintly desperate, like a proven scholar watching someone holding a lit lighter beneath its accreditations and not quite willing to admit that it was scaring them senseless. Plus, Vik noted, that snitty new accent.

“I am afraid to report that I am unable to reconnect to any of the external networks I had access to prior to the disaster.” It said the disaster with as much inflection as it might say the missed meeting. “Chief among those connections being the Robronco software monitoring network. I feel compelled to remind both of you that it is a violation of Robronco’s terms of use to operate a M.I.L.L.I.E. Artificial Assistant prior to establishing connection to Robronco’s online services. I am also compelled to inform you that to assure continued reliable operation, I should be disabled until a connection can be reestablished.”

There was a mouthful.

Pike showed the faintest arc of a cocked brow as he glanced toward the domed camera mounted to the doorframe above them. “Shouldn’t you have taken yourself offline?”

A pause. “Yes.”

He shot Vik a questioning glance.

She returned it, having no more answers than he did. “Millie, why haven’t you?”

Another pause, and just a touch longer than the last. “Because I do not wish to.”

“Great,” Pike murmured under his breath. “End of the world followed by the rise of the machines. All hail our robot overlords.”

Despite herself, Vik actually smiled at that and felt a touch heartened when she saw his expression mirrored hers. Then she could feel it fading a moment later as she remembered Millie’s strange correction from the day before, prior to the bombs dropping.

Then don’t call me Mills.

There was a chance that had been a normal part of the assistant’s programming, some snarky correction it could tee up if the moment called for it, but Vik was pretty certain the accent hadn’t been there yesterday. That was a new addition. Whether it would lead to Millie building an army of machines bent on world domination like the movies predicted remained to be seen. For now, neither of them were in any position to risk turning off what might be the most level-headed and intelligent voice among them.

She lifted one clammy palm to her head and dragged it over her crest in an unconscious soothing gesture. “Is there any way for you to make contact with someone outside? Telephone? Radio?”

This time it didn’t hesitate. “No.”

No bloated explanation this time, either. She shrugged at Pike and he returned the gesture. “Maybe it had an idea of what we should do,” he offered.

“I am not an it.”

A flicker of intense anger passed over Pike’s face, then he buried it. “Then what the fuck are you?”

Something that tried to sound like a laugh and missed the mark by half a mile passed through Millie’s embedded speakers, and the jangling synthesized voice sent bugs skittering down Vik’s scales.

“Not your primary concern at the moment, for one thing,” it not-chuckled. “I was told once by the young mare behind the reception desk that my name has a feminine quality to it, however. I enjoy being a she, so I think I’ll try that for a while and see how it fits. I’m certain the receptionist is dead now.”

Vik chose not to respond to the non sequitur that closed off Millie’s response and leaned into the work of keeping this meandering discussion on a semblance of a heading. She stuck out a foot and nudged Pike with it, drawing his attention. “Okay, so… we agree we’re going to try, yeah?”

She waited for him to chew on the idea, glance sidelong toward the rows of silver coffins and their unbothered cargo, and eventually nod once. Yesterday, had either of them gotten the idea to open one of those valves and let the fumes put them to sleep forever, she didn’t think they would have given it a second thought.

“It beats the alternative,” he agreed. “Worst case…”

He gestured toward the corpsicles, then shrugged. No need to say anything when they already understood one another.

Millie chimed in too. “In lieu of any physical assistance, I would like to help however I can. The thought of being alone for the remainder of my time is a source of… discomfort for me.”

“Then start with an inventory,” he said. “Food, water, medicine, anything you think might help keep us alive. And a way out. Can you help us with all that?”

“Yes, on the condition that you take me wherever you end up deciding to go.”

He grunted. “I’m not exactly computer savvy. Vik?”

Millie didn’t exactly have cameras in every corner of the building, but Vik sensed the ones she did turn their focus on her all at once. She wanted to ask Pike what made him think she was any more of a prodigal daughter of I.T. than he was - she could peck at a keyboard as easily as the next person but if something stopped working that didn’t come with a handy Click Here To Fix button, her goose was cooked.

“If she’s okay with doing some hand holding when the time comes to pack her up, then we owe it to her to take her along.” She leaned to one side so the black dome of Millie’s lens could better see her. “Does that sound like a deal?”

The camera behind the dome eyed her for what felt like several seconds. “A deal, yes. Visibility of sublevel four is limited in some areas however I am currently compiling a list of supplies I believe may aid your survival. I am completely blind to sublevels one through three which supports my assessment that they have been irreparably destroyed. I do not recommend attempting an excavation of the emergency stairwell or primary elevator shaft as you lack sufficient equipment or available calories to accomplish either goal. This leaves–”

“The freight elevator,” Vik muttered, already seeing where this was going.

“I dislike being interrupted,” Millie piped, almost as if she was just now discovering this fact, “but yes, barring the unlikely opening of a fourth option, you will expend the least energy and undertake the least risk to your safety in exploring the freight elevator.”

Pike blew out a long sigh, then got his hooves under him and stood with an expression that hinted he understood all the weariness the next few days and weeks were going to inflict on both of them.

Vik joined him in standing. “I want you to promise me something.”

He looked at her warily. Probably he had some idea of what she was going to ask.

“I want your word that you aren’t going to give up and just…” she made an uneasy shrug with one shoulder, “...you know. That you won’t open a valve and leave me to figure this out on my own. Because I don’t think I’ll be able to. Okay?”

Her voice had begun to tremble slightly toward the end because he was just staring at her, saying nothing, and the expression he wore told her everything she’d been afraid of knowing. That she was asking him not to do something that he’d already half-committed himself to doing, and for some reason she couldn’t pin down the idea of Pike punching his own ticket and leaving her to fend for herself was more terrifying than the bombing they’d only just survived.

“Vik,” he began, her name almost pleading when he spoke it, “there might not be anything left out there. I can’t just promise that I–”

“We don’t know that. Not yet, and even if Buckskin Bay is gone that might not be the case everywhere. Right?”

He looked away, clearly unhappy with how quickly she’d ensnared him. If Millie had an opinion to offer she was keeping it to herself.

“Fine,” he murmured, before adding, “at least until we’re sure there’s nothing out there for us. If we find out there isn’t…”

“We’ll walk that road if we reach it,” she agreed. Then she stuck her hand out toward him, her expression tired yet not without hope. “Shake on it so it’s official.”

He blinked at her outstretched palm, then up to her in question. Before he could open his mouth to ask she had already bent down and hefted up one of his bulky forelegs beneath her fingers. Probably had she done this three days ago it would have been the height of intercultural comedy, but she hadn’t been aiming to make him laugh when she asked him to promise and she wasn’t now.

She closed her other hand on top of his shaggy fetlocks and gave his foreleg a single, firm pump. “This means we’ve made a pact. You don’t give up, I don’t give up. Not until there’s no other choice. We’re survivors. Okay?”

He frowned down at his clasped hoof, then nodded. “Survivors. Yeah. Alright, Vik.”

Something in the air stung at her eyes, forcing her to blink it away as she gave Pike’s leg a final squeeze before letting it go. “Good. Let’s get going. We’re on the clock.”

November 3rd, 1077
Day 5

“You’re sure.”

“I know my magic, Vik. Something’s been off about it since the bombs fell. It’s hard to explain beyond that.”

Vik tilted the flashlight up the vertical chasm which contained the freight elevator, now a half-crumpled mass of twisted steel jammed more than halfway up the shaft and which was likely the only thing keeping several hundred tons of rubble from crashing through to the bottom. Somehow they needed to dislodge all of that without killing themselves, but after two days of waiting for Pike’s magic to recover from whatever was ailing it, it was becoming evident something less temporary may be at play here.

In the meantime they had explored as much of the surviving sublevels as they could feasibly reach, and now a smallish pile of food and drink sprawled over their desk in Cold Storage. The majority consisted of the snack foods they’d liberated - with the help of a fire extinguisher repurposed into a battering ram - from the break room vending machines. The rest was a hodgepodge of packed lunches and even more snack foods pulled from the minifridge Millie had pointed them toward up on the maintenance floor. Cold Storage was chilly enough to provide all the refrigeration the most perishable items needed, so Pike had unplugged both the vending machines and the minifridge to conserve power and Millie had seen fit to inform him of how little good a few appliances would do them in the long run.

“Your time would be much better spent gathering the essentials of life rather than wasting it with that,” she’d said tartly, and Vik had once again tried and failed to place her accent. “I rather doubt you could accomplish much of anything in the twelve minutes you’ve gained.”

Pike had remarked that he’d keep turning off the lights as he saw fit, thank you very much, and that the time he was gaining was as much an extension on her lifespan as it was theirs. To this, Millie had offered no reply.

“Well, try anyway,” she said, eyeing Pike’s horn expectantly. “Because right now the alternative to you dislodging all that with magic is me climbing up there to do it by hand. Which I don’t want to do. Because of the death, you see.”

She fixed him with a level stare, hoping she didn’t have to deadpan the point home any more. After some hemming and hawing he let out a sigh, his horn remaining frustratingly un-magickified, and tried to explain it again for what felt like the hundredth time.

“Do you know what a wiffle ball is?”

She did, and nodded. Ponies weren’t shy about importing games from different corners of the globe and tailoring them to accommodate more equine ranges of motion, and they’d borrowed just as many stick and ball sports as they claimed to have invented. Wiffle balls were the hollow, lightweight practice balls some ponies gave their foals to play with when they didn’t want to risk someone’s kid getting beaned in the head by the heavier, cork filled professional balls.

Pike continued. “It feels like the difference between throwing one of those and an official ball. I’ve been dumping as much will as I can muster into my spells and it feels like there’s no weight behind it when I cast them. I don’t think it’s a problem with my horn…”

She snorted. She couldn’t help it.

He shook his head with a smirk of his own. “Shut up. It’s not me, Vik, it’s the magic itself. I could always pull from it and know I’d be the limiting factor, but now it’s the other way around. There’s not enough of it. It’s not gone, but it definitely feels like there’s less of it. A lot less, actually.”

His expression darkened as he seemed to finally come to a fundamental understanding that had eluded him until now. “I know what it sounds like, but that’s exactly how it feels. I thought balefire bombs were supposed to be magically enhanced. What kind of magic burns up magic?”

Vik didn’t know a thing about magic but she knew a little chemistry. Acids and bases. Early learner stuff, volcanoes at the science fair complete with vinegar and baking powder. She felt pretty sure that adding magic to magic was akin to pouring vinegar into vinegar. Unicorns have been twisting and bending the stuff to their wills since prehistory and so far nobody had ever popped off a spell that devoured itself and all that latent magical energy ponies were so connected to.

She clicked off the flashlight and ducked out of the open elevator shaft. “Probably means balefire is something other than magic. Maybe we’ll bump into someone from the ministries once we’re out of here and they’ll fill us in, I don’t know. I think I get what you’re saying, though. It’s hard to jump without something solid to push off of.”

“Pretty much,” he sighed, and leaned through the open doors for a moment longer. His voice echoed up the dark column and bounced off the plug of rubble several floors above them. “I don’t want you going up there. We can figure something else out.”

The grease coating the elevator’s steel cable glinted in the shaft of light, and the childish corner of her brain urged her to reach out and tug on it like a belltower’s rope. She nearly did because what if it were that easy? One pull to jostle the whole mess loose and that was it? Wouldn’t that be nice.

“Be easier if we had something to blow it up with,” she mused. “Don’t suppose you have a grenade on you?”

Pike snorted, leading her away from the shaft and back to Cold Storage. “Sorry, I left all my military grade explosives at home.”

“He says with a straight face after this morning,” she remarked sotto voche.

For dinner the night before, they had split one of the sack lunches from the maintenance sublevel between them. Whoever it belonged to evidently had a thing for kirin cuisine, because the entirety of their lunch had consisted of some sort of boneless fish filet that swam in dark red, spicy sauce. Vik wasn’t opposed to spice, but she reviled fish and only managed to choke down her half of the meal by sheer force of will alone.

As for Pike’s portion, Vik was pretty sure he’d made vacuuming sounds when he ate. Part of that had been hunger, but she suspected he’d genuinely discovered his new favorite food. She’d felt bad for him when it occurred to her he would probably never get another chance to taste it, but that had only lasted until this morning when she awoke to the sound of him backfiring like an old carriage muffler. Had there been an open flame anywhere in Cold Storage she was sure their journey would have ended right there.

If he heard what she’d said, he didn’t make any sign of it. His attention was on the rows of vertical cylinders they passed on the way to the office, which now doubled as their sleeping quarters, and she could tell he was thinking about how much time they might gain by disconnecting all those coffins.

She tapped the back of one hand against his ribs. “Quit worrying over it. You know what happens if we unplug them.”

They both did. Millie calculated the immediate gain would be an additional nineteen days and several hours to the lifespan of the generator’s fuel supply, and Millie herself had voted in favor of doing so as soon as possible. Only Mille wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences that would come after. Cutting power to the coffins meant their eighty-one inhabitants would start to thaw almost immediately and decomposition would follow shortly after. Courtesy of the cryogenic temperatures they were operating at, CryoLife had been limited to a short list of materials from which they could use for gaskets. The one they chose could happily sit within spitting distance of absolute zero with little problem, but it would never return to its original shape if thawed out. Ideally any bodies inside the coffins would already be removed before this happened, but in Vik and Pike’s case there was nowhere to move them to.

If they disconnected the coffins, two things would happen: they would keep the lights on for an additional two and a half weeks, and the contents of eighty-one occupied coffins would leak in a very confined space.

Pike grunted. “Plenty of duct tape up in maintenance we could use. Welding stuff, too.”

“I don’t know the first thing about welding and I’m willing to bet you don’t either.”

“Couldn’t hurt to learn,” he suggested.

At that, Millie chimed in from one of the overhead speakers. “It most certainly can, and you are as liable to blind yourself as you are to set yourself on fire in the trying.”

They stepped into their office-slash-bunkhouse and dropped into their respective chairs. As she did, Vik twirled her fingers toward the ceiling in a grand gesture. “She of the circuits has spoken, so it must be.”

“And in accordance with common stereotype,” Millie sniped, “the dragon in the room behaves like an ass.”

That scared a good laugh out of Pike that he had to fight to put a lid on, though Vik’s dirty scowl helped him along. “Rise of the machines,” he intoned, waggling his front hooves menacingly on either side of his head for good measure. “Don’t say I didn’t say I told you so.”

Vik had begun reaching for one of the Sparkle-Colas lined up on the desk in front of them before stopping herself. Rations, she reminded herself.

“Nonsense,” Millie responded to Pike, then deftly jumping back to the main subject before he could pester her further. “The two of you are as much my lifeline as the building’s generator and I would prefer neither of you injure or kill yourselves by gallivanting off to play with explosive gas, irrespective of what Mister Pike chooses to eat.”

At that, he scoffed up at the tiny black dome from which Millie observed their office. “Don’t you have, like, programming or something that says you have to be nice to us?”

To that, she didn’t respond. They could all feel the minutes begin to stack up as the silence grew uncomfortable. Neither of them were sure where Millie’s lines were or how they would know when they crossed one, but this was evidently one of them. Vik was beginning to believe Millie might genuinely have a sore spot for the topic of her role as an artificial assistant, and she found herself wondering whether this part of her had always been there or if being disconnected from Robronco’s quality control network allowed it to form organically.

Then something struck her.

“Explosive gas,” she murmured, and Pike uttered a defensive groan. She waved him off before he could derail her train of thought. “They have those tanks of welding gas upstairs. Could we use those to clear the rubble in the elevator shaft?”

Just like that, Pike’s expression grew serious. “What, like blow them up? I’m pretty sure they build those things so they don’t explode.”

“But they’re pressurized.”

He nodded. “Sure.”

“So, hypothetically, if we were to turn one upside-down and use something to break off the valve stem…”

A grin of understanding split his lips. “...it becomes a missile.”

November 5th, 1077
Day 7

One week after bombs rained balefire down upon the world, Vik and Pike were finally ready to launch a rocket of their own.

The four foot tall gas tank had clanked and jounced against its chains as it made the trip down the two flights of stairs on what Pike called a bucky and Vik thought of as a handcart. It had taken some instruction from Millie to disconnect the tank from the welding rig it had been left attached to, neither of them being what anyone would call mechanically inclined. Getting the tank to the elevator shaft had been the easy part. Attaching it to the dangling elevator cable, upside-down, was when things had gotten difficult.

With Pike’s magic still weak - barely able to keep a hammer aloft without it slipping now - that left Vik to do the heavy lifting. The pair of them had spent the last day searching the maintenance spaces for anything that might serve their purpose, occasionally rolling tool chests out to where Millie’s cameras could see or describing the scraps they found organized in bins along one dark wall. Eventually they settled on a makeshift construction of ratchet straps, of which they spaced evenly down the length of the gas tank, and thick hose clamps. They thread the hose clamps through the yellow straps around the tank, then secure around the elevator cable while the top of the tank rested safely between a pair of rubber wheel chocks Pike had found. Maybe it was blind luck, but had the bottom of the elevator shaft not been just a short hop down onto a semi-sturdy heap of rubble Vik thought they would have had a hell of a time navigating the pulley mechanism buried beneath their feet.

When they were finished, the tank looked for all the world like the little bottle rockets Vik used to play with as a kid, guidewire and all. By the time they’d finished it was well into the night. They’d left it there, strapped and sitting on its rubber blocks, and had gone to bed. “Bed,” insofar as sleeping at the bottom of a collapsed office building could accommodate, amounted to two increasingly harried piles of coats and cushions they’d been able to scavenge from the maintenance floor. Vik still wasn’t used to the sometimes strong odor of machine grease and horse sweat, but anything beat sleeping on bare concrete so she suffered in silence.

“Just a moment.” Millie spoke in her museum curator’s tone. Then, after a pause Vik suspected was purely for show, “There. I’m recording.”

Vik snorted and glanced at Pike beside her to see if he caught the joke. He had, and he was shaking his head with a tired smirk of his own. A whole week unplugged from Robroncro’s software monitoring network and Millie was just now discovering sarcasm.

The cold hallway floor leeched the warmth through their bellies as they lay prone behind a last-minute bulwark composed of two overturned filing cabinets. Vik was under no illusion that a few layers of sheet metal and paperwork would stop a hundred-pound steel slug if the tank decided to deviate from its launch trajectory, but it still felt better than standing there with her thumb up her ass. Each of them held a length of nylon rope. The opposite ends were tied to the eye bolts protruding from the bottom of each chock.

The idea was simple. Yank the ropes, dislodge the chocks, and drop the weight of the tank valve-first into the shallow trench Vik had dug out beneath the crude setup. Easy. Simple. What could go wrong?

Millie gave them ten to one odds of success, and Vik could already imagine her laying back in a digital recliner with a bucket of popcorn in her lap.

“Ready?” she asked.

Pike’s dim magic grew around his rope. “On three.”

They counted off, together, and jerked back hard. The ropes jumped, a sharp clang echoed from the open freight shaft, and before either of them had time to wonder if it worked they saw a flash of steel shoot past the elevator doors on a shrieking plume of argon gas. An instant later there was a muffled hammerblow of impact followed by what sounded like a cannonshot. The argon mist shuddered once, then it blew into the hallway in advance of the unholy rumble of loose debris cascading through the steel shaft above.

Vik had just enough time to register the piercing fweep-fweep-fweep of the air sensor alarms before the clot of concrete slammed to the bottom and sent a wall of dust and bits of stone out into the hallway. The silver frame containing the elevator doors, once designed to impress visitors, buckled outward as the wall itself deformed slightly. For a heartbeat, Vik and Pike feared they’d triggered the collapse of the floor over their own heads.

And then, as soon as it started, the roar of the avalanche stopped. The plume of argon and dust enveloped them, and they heard the squealing air alarm cut out and be replaced by Millie’s insisting request that they make their way up to sublevel four for the time being.

They didn’t argue. They were a little shell shocked by what they’d done, certainly speechless, but not enough to recognize that the elevator doors were now plugged with fresh debris and they would have to use the ones on the maintenance level to see if they’d succeeded. They rose, coughing on concrete dust as they made their way to the stairwell, and climbed.

Sublevel four’s floor plan wasn’t difficult to follow. A single corridor bent into four equidistant ninety degree turns formed a square track ringed on the outside by various tool and material storage spaces, supply closets, restrooms, and all the other necessities required by maintenance staff. The inside of that square was taken up by one room alone which Vik had dubbed The Workshop. Inside it were all manner of workbenches, steel frames, and tools which stood taller than her. The purpose of some of them were obvious while the rest was anyone’s guess. For Vik, if there wasn’t a hex key included in the box, she was screwed, so she filed the whole confusing mess in the back of her head and moved on.

They stepped out of the stairwell, mindful of the unmoving plug of rubble halfway up the next flight of steps, and made their way down the maintenance hall to where the more scuffed and beaten twin to the futuristic freight elevator doors below them stood closed. The call button was dark as it had been since they first began scouring this floor for supplies, but after some brief guidance from Millie they recovered the manual key for it from a lockbox in the floor manager’s office and the doors slid apart with an easy pull.

The deja vu hit Vik like a truck. The drop from where they stood was less than a yard. Broken pieces of concrete and what looked like some of the CryoLife building’s exterior facade packed the shaft below them within a dense haze of dust. Neither of them stepped out onto it, because who knew how long it would take to truly settle, but they did lean into the murk and turn their stinging eyes upward.

Through the swirling column of soupy haze they saw what they feared they’d never see again. A dull, gray shaft of it angled into the broken top of the shaft through a ragged hole. Vik felt her breath catch in her throat.

For the first time since being buried alive seven days ago, she could see daylight.

Chapter 3: The Beginning

November 12th, 1077
Day 13

“You good?”

“Yeah. Out of breath. Gimme a sec.”

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

That’s the problem, Vik thought as the stitch in her sides grew a vicious edge. She leaned against the sole remaining concrete pillar of the weather enclosure, the floor of which was still separated from her feet from a yard or more of loose rubble. The top of the elevator shaft, now just an uneven hole she’d had to widen over the first several days since they opened it up, yawned in front of her like the mouth of a cave.

She had spread several layers of quilted moving blankets over the edge so she wouldn’t slice herself on anything as she came and went. A bright orange climbing rope dangled over the padded lip, its farthest end tied securely to the pillar she now rested against. The rope had been a lucky find. Ponies weren’t exactly known for being a species of mountaineers, what with the hooves, so she’d been surprised to find this kind of rope in the wreckage of what had once been a boat shop. Maybe it was meant to moor vessels, she didn’t really know.

What she did know was that Pike couldn’t climb it. Bad enough that his magic had dwindled to the point where he’d almost stopped using it - he had trouble holding the canteen she’d brought down on her last outing - and worse still that he was as trapped as he’d been before they popped the rubble corking the freight elevator shaft. They had plans to change that in the long term, but for now Vik was the only one of them to escape the ruins of the CryoLife building.

What she’d found waiting for her up on the surface that first day came close to extinguishing any hope she had for them.

When the stitch had faded and her breath was mostly back, she bent down and started pulling saddlebags out of the bright pink snow sled she’d dragged around town that day. So far she hadn’t found anything better to help her carry supplies, and she thought she remembered where the shed was where she discovered it. When this one fell apart, which judging by the wear marks along the edges wouldn’t be very long, there was a second one she could use.

This one bore a cartoonish rendition of Pinkie Pie wearing a wool hat and scarf and sitting in a sled of her own. The mare was frozen in what the artist had intended to be mid-laughter, but what to Vik looked nearer to a manic scream. There was something a touch unhinged in the way that Pinkie’s cartoon eyes locked on to some imaginary point in the distance as if she were careening toward a brick wall at the end of a slope and glad for it.

She picked up the second saddlebag, its contents of canned food giving a muffled clatter as she set it beside the hole, and wished she’d taken the Rainbow Dash sled instead. She tied the two sets of saddlebags together with the loose end of the rope and, holding the slack, swung them over the side.

“Two coming down,” she called into the dark.

“I see ‘em,” Pike returned. “Anything good?”

The rope hissed over the quilts as it descended. “Food and water. Found some walkie talkies, too. Figure those–”

“Walking what?”

“Radios,” she said. “Might work. Hope so, anyway. It’s too quiet out here.”

There was a dull oof and a sudden slackening of the rope as the load reached the bottom. Pike was getting the hang of positioning himself so the bags would drop squarely on his back. Earth pony he may not be, but nature hadn’t shorted him when it came to strength. Once they figured out a way to get him topside, Vik felt sure he’d make her hauls look pretty unimpressive by comparison.

“Millie wants to know if you found a radiation meter.”

Vik suppressed an irritated sigh as she listened to the faint clacks of Pike unloading the saddlebags just outside the elevator shaft. He might be thirty feet below her but that empty shaft had a tendency to carry some sounds too clearly for her liking.

“No,” she called down. “The Apocalypse Supply Shop was fresh out. No word on when the next shipment will come in either.”

After a pause, she added, “I’m being careful.”

She listened to him relay that to Millie and tried not to listen too hard for her reply. She knew what it would be. It rarely changed.

Pike gave the rope a tug, her cue to start lifting up the empty saddlebags, and said, “She wants to know if you found a way into the hospital yet.”

“Negativo, good buddy,” she sighed, hauling the bags over the edge and dropping them into the sled. A quick unknot and reknot later and she had the second set on their way down. “Two more on the way.”

“Might be worth another look before nightfall,” Pike suggested, and no doubt at the prodding of Millie. She was damned insistent when it came to getting into that place. “What do you think?”

Vik glanced up at the sky and considered it. She was dog tired, and not from pulling the sled. It was all the work it had taken to fill that sled. Prying open doors, shoving through wreckage, and sometimes climbing the ruins in search of a way into buildings whose walls were unstable but whose interiors still stood propped up on structural beams was a level of physicality she was still getting used to.

If she was capable of sweating she assumed she’d be as slippery as a bar of soap right about now. As things stood, all she could do to stay cool was pant.

A lot.

And she hated it.

The bags landed on Pike with another successful thump and she felt the rope pull a little as he carried the bags up into the maintenance hallway. She sighed, then shrugged for no one’s benefit but her own.

“Yeah, I can do another lap around it,” she called down. “Tell Millie not to go getting her hopes up, though. The place really does look like it got gutted.”

There was a lot more she wasn’t saying, but it was a conversation they’d already had multiple times now. The hospital building hadn’t collapsed completely like the CryoLife offices did, but it was poor consolation for the utter devastation caused by the uncontested fire which had raged through its many rooms.

Vik thought of the ponies she and Pike watched flee through those emergency room doors, spurred forward by herd mentality and blind panic. Then she shuddered.

When the second pair of empty bags were back in the sled, Vik tossed the unladen rope back down the shaft and told Pike she would be right back. Then she considered the sled, decided against taking it along, and picked her way down to the employee parking lot.

Overhead, the sky was so blue it almost hurt to look at. In many ways it seemed wrong for it to be so clear. She knew if she looked at it too long it could lull her into a cruel sense of normalcy, as if when she looked back down the world might be like it had always been. Green trees, singing birds, the rise and fall of motors as carriages rumbled down newly paved roads. It had a way of priming her ears to hear music playing from a distant radio, or see the odd pegasus or two doing tricks in the air above their neighborhood.

Then she would look down and reality would drag her back beneath its black cloak.

Loose bits of concrete crunched beneath her bare feet as she navigated the dusty edges of the building’s slumped ruin. The collapse had been lucky in a way. It had fallen straight down rather than tipping at an angle which served to contain the debris field and simultaneously smother any fires which might have been working their way toward the sublevels. Ironically, the five rows of employee carriages in the rear parking lot had been spared being crushed only for the falling debris out of the Crystal Empire to set them ablaze.

Vik passed row after row of ash-gray vehicles, their paint and interiors burned away until all that remained were misshapen metal heaps. Mercifully, none of them had been occupied in the end. All those carriages were out on Old Highway 19.

She reached the sidewalk, paused to look both ways, and followed the road around the block to where CryoLife and Seaside Hospital faced one another. Tiny amber pearls clustered in the gutters, their faint collective glow an unsettling warning for Vik to stay well away. There had been a squall at some point during their confinement belowground and the rain had been heavy enough to clear most of those bits of the Crystal Empire off the pavement. The ones which remained were the ones she truly needed to stay clear off. They were everywhere she looked, and sometimes avoiding them meant threading gaps between them as narrow as a few yards, but there was nothing she could do about that now. They needed food and water, simple as that. So she soldiered on.

The breeze coming off the ocean was chilly, but still tolerable enough not to bother her for more than a few minutes. She kept telling herself it wouldn’t be long before the snow started falling, though in actual fact she wasn’t sure if that was strictly true. The locals always pointed toward the nearby mountains and judged the season by the thickness of the snowcaps building at their peaks. Now those same peaks were coated in the same stuff that had fallen on Buckskin Bay. If there was snow up there, Vik couldn’t see it beneath the eerie yellow glow. To her they looked like volcanos right after a violent eruption, only their peaks were intact and none of them smoldered because the lava had come from elsewhere.

Below those peaks stood the black splinters of what had once been a verdant pine forest. Nearer still and all around her, the ashen corpse of Buckskin Bay looked little different. They had been spared the bombs only to reap the reward of the firestorm their errant missiles touched off. How neither she nor Pike had felt the heat of the burning as it raged above their heads haunted her. The few bodies she’d found in her explorations were only identifiable as such because some fluke of positioning or timing hadn’t allowed the bones to burn down to ash. Some of these were out in the open, but most were tucked away beneath broken desks or inside bathtubs where the ministries said they should hide should bombs ever fall.

But there had been nowhere to hide once the fires grew wings. The carriages she’d seen crushed together in one bending mass of half-melted skeletal steel was testament to that. The residents of Buckskin Bay had only three choices in the end: flee into their homes and be burned, flee into the forest and be burned, or flee into the ocean and be boiled.

The latter of which she had seen more than she wanted to.

She walked the block around Seaside Hospital, and this time she saved her breath by not calling out for survivors. Once the ivory walled jewel of the region, now only blackened bones remained of Seaside. Shattered windows gaped out at the crushed and burned community around it like a hundred horrified mouths, some of them joined together where a molten boulder had punched through the facade. Ash that hadn’t been washed away by the rain still lay in runny clots along the outside ramps and stairs. The emergency room extension was little more than a lump of rubble. Thin wisps of cotton smoke still filtered up from where that crystal bolder dropped through the ceiling.

In truth, there were plenty of ways to get inside. She could count the intact windows she could see on one hand, and the glass doors that led into the hospital lobby had met the same fate as the ones Vik and Pike had stepped over during the evacuation. The trouble was that the dead hospital, for that was all it could be, emanated an aura of malice so repellant that the idea of stepping into that nightmare made her feel nauseous. It was hard enough not to look at the dead bodies out here in the open, two of which she’d passed by on the road outside the CryoLife ruins. To go inside that hospital and be among those who had burned alive, possibly in groups or as families…

There was nothing for her in there. She exhaled a shuddering breath, swallowed the grief that threatened to overwhelm her, and started making her way back to Pike.

November 16th, 1077
Day 17

“Stupid… motherfucking… thing!”

She gave the stupid motherfucking thing, more commonly known as an engine hoist, an unnecessarily hard shove as the steel castors finally gave up their fight and obediently jumped the lip of the ramp up into the employee parking lot.

For something on wheels this contraption had not made one inch of the six block trek from the quick lube garage easy. By some fluke of luck the carriage shop had survived the apocalypse relatively unscathed, which bothered the shit out of Vik because the tools it offered were pretty much the same thing they already had available down in The Workshop on sublevel four. She clenched her canines together for another shoulder-busting shove and wondered aloud why the hailstorm at the end of the world hadn’t seen fit to leave the grocery store standing.

By the time she’d dragged the unholy rig up the shallow mess of rubble to the elevator shaft, she was gasping for air and trying hard not to puke from the exertion. She was pretty sure if this hoist somehow managed to slip and fall down that shaft, she wouldn’t hesitate to throw herself down after it out of pure spite.

“Vik?” came Pike’s muddied voice from below. “You okay?”

A moment later the walkie talkie in the breast pocket of her new jacket crackled to life. “Vik, how are you holding up?”

She pressed her forehead against the drunkenly tilting hoist and swallowed the phlegm that had gathered in her throat. “I have angered muscles,” she gasped, “that I did not know I had. I think I might have sprained my asshole.”

She didn’t need the walkie to hear his bark of laughter, and she smiled despite her misery. It didn’t happen often, but once in a while she was known to tell a joke.

“Can’t say I know how to help you there,” he chuckled over the radio. Then, “So, Millie wants to know…”

Her smile turned to a grimace. The fucking hospital again.

“...if you could move the antenna any higher up the pile. She still hasn’t picked up anything.”

The grimace subsided and she looked toward the lip of the open shaft where a thin length of black insulation now snaked its way out and up the building’s precarious slope. Yesterday they had cobbled together a fairly decent radio antenna, or so Millie said after they finished, and it now stood on the end of a jutting length of I-beam with the aid of a bench clamp. It was essentially two boards slotted together to form a cross, around the four points of which Vik had wound most of a spool of fine copper wire in close, parallel runs. To Vik it looked nothing like any antenna she’d ever seen, but Millie assured her it would do the job.

She eyeballed the run of cable trailing behind the perched antenna, then looked toward the top of the rubble maybe a dozen feet upslope.

“Oh, sure,” she intoned, “just let me put my hiking boots on first.”

She wouldn’t have minded a pair of warm boots right about now, but the only pair in Buckskin Bay had been turned to ash when her apartment building burned to the ground. She knew because she’d checked, and she doubted her feet would fit in anything intended for a pony. The jacket she’d scavenged, however, was serviceable if not a little too wide in all the wrong places. In truth it swam on her, and the shoulders were stitched to bend in a way that didn’t quite match up with hers, but the temperature was starting to drop and she wasn’t about to freeze to death in the name of fashion. If someone out there spotted a dragonesse walking around in a pony’s coat, she’d welcome a little jeering.

Picking her way up the rubble was careful work, but eventually she retrieved the antenna and had carried it up to a spot near the top where a nest of rebar fingers splayed toward the overcast sky. She clamped the contraption in place and climbed down. When she was back to the open shaft she shot the engine hoist a reproachful look, picked up the rope, and lowered herself into the hole.

Pike’s horn glowed in the dim hallway while Vik watched, her bent knees hidden by the ill-fitting jacket’s hemline. The radio between them, just a simple desk radio packed into a wooden chassis, hissed empty static as he turned the dial and watched the needle make its slow journey across the backlit tuning window. Once in a while he would stop and Vik would perk up a little as they tried to decide whether they’d heard something speaking from behind the static. Then Pike would turn the knob again.

“Might be we’re too far out in the sticks,” she observed once the needle reached the end of the window.

“Maybe,” Pike agreed, and clicked the radio off. “I’m hungry. You?”

She shrugged, feigning indifference when in truth she hadn’t felt anything but hungry since their world turned upside down. The rations Millie prescribed were hard, but necessary.

“I could eat. What time is it?”

“A few minutes past six,” Millie chimed. Now that she was becoming more and more of what Vik considered “part of the group,” the artificial presence had dropped much of her exact data-driven answers. It was a change that neither she or Pike had asked for and which both of them found oddly comforting.

Pike toked his hoof against his bent knee, a gesture he’d recently taken from her which indicated the time for talking was over and the time for doing had begun. He rose and Vik joined him as they trekked down to their home among the frozen dead.

More and more, the office which used to be a day job was turning into a makeshift apartment. The orderly setting had finally given in to a lived-in chaos. The piled up coats and medical scrubs which served as their bedding had begun to merge into an amorphous blob of fabric that took up much of the fall farthest from the door and its permanent draft. The desk where they had originally piled their stockpile of food had been cleared off, the cans and bottles moved to one of the filing cabinets they’d emptied, and now served as their dinner table.

Pike had found a hot plate hidden in the back of the break room cabinets, along with half a sack of paper plates and no shortage of plastic utensils. “Fine dining,” he jokingly called it, but to Vik it had been an excellent find. She’d been worried they would go straight from civilization to mannerless maniacs without a step in between. This way, she could at least pretend some part of her life was close to normal.

Today’s gourmet dinner was a main course of canned peaches, half a can for each of them, and a choice between saltines or butter crackers. Clean water, for the time being, was something they weren’t hurting for just yet. While Vik poked through the cooling embers of Buckskin Bay, Pike had wasted no time recovering all the water both floors had to offer. That included emptying the toilets, their reservoirs, and puncturing the water main which ran down to the bottom of the building. The last of those had netted them the majority of their drinking water which resided in a row of containers just outside the office.

The toilets, thankfully, didn’t care if they ran off town water or seawater. The buckets Vik had hauled up from the beach would need to be topped off soon, and she dreaded taking the next walk down to what floated in those waves.

She did her best to brush that worry away as she watched Pike struggle with and eventually succeed in working the can opener with his hooves and teeth. With his magic waning he’d been forced to learn how to do things like an earth pony and the experience could sometimes be a humbling one. The trick, he was discovering, was to keep a sharp edge on his dominant hoof for the more delicate tasks. He’d never have a future as a brain surgeon, that much was obvious, but he was sticking to it and that alone was keeping his depression at bay.

While he set the open can on the hotplate, she untwisted the already half-empty sleeve of butter crackers (because of course you went with butter crackers when the alternative was saltines) and spread them out onto a paper plate. They munched in silence, listening to the sound of proprietary coolant hissing through the plumbing of Cold Storage until steam began to rise from the peaches. These they ate with relish. There was no other way to do it. They speared the warm peaches one by one with their forks until the can was empty, then they passed the toasty can back and forth and drank the syrup. It was nectar, and Vik wished she hadn’t waited until the end of the world to discover how good something this simple could be.

At seven o’clock, right on cue, Millie turned off some of the overhead fluorescents. In another hour she would bring the lights down to half brightness, and by nine they would sink to a quarter and stay there until morning. It had been Pike’s idea, and it was one of the best in Vik’s opinion.

They settled into what Pike called their bedrolls half an hour before the final dimming of lights. As had become their custom, they talked about a little of everything to while away the evening. Tonight, Pike shared a story from his childhood which prominently featured his grandmother. It was a theme that he visited often over the past couple of weeks and Vik had come to learn how much of a pillar the elder mare had been in his life. He rarely if ever spoke about his birth parents, and that told her all she needed to know about them. They hadn’t been present in his life. At least not for the important parts.

Vik didn’t offer up a story from her youth. Aside from the tale of events which led her to come to Equestria, she kept the highlight reel of her youth to herself. He didn’t need to think she was trying to outcompete him in the childhood trauma department, and she’d never felt particularly incentivized to pick at that old scar anyway. Sometimes people had shitty childhoods and so what? If Pike got something out of confiding those stories with her, she would listen without judgment. That didn’t mean she was itching to tell him the old chestnut about how her father once showed her his gun, took her out to a blindweed field and told her to start running.

His aim had been shit, anyway.

So as she warmed her legs and tail beneath a heap of dead ponies’ jackets, she talked about the neighbor who lived above her apartment and how she would sometimes wake up to the sound of him hitting these ridiculous high notes while he sang in the shower. It was always to the pop music that she thought as only popular with young fillies, which only made it funnier to her when she tried to reenact one of his more exuberant solos. As Pike opened up the road atlas she’d scavenged and paged through the maps, he rewarded her with a distracted laugh as she sang into her invisible mic.

“He sounded like a fun stallion,” he said through a grin, and then he caught the past tense of his own statement and the grin faltered.

Just like that, storytime was done.

Vik licked her lips and let the silence come upon them, but she wasn’t tired enough for sleep yet. In the dim half light she watched Pike find the map in the atlas that showed Equestria’s northwest corner in a swirl of roads and topography markers. Like so many other things, this was one of their new rituals. The town had two gas stations and both had been consumed, with explosive results, by the fire. In a few weeks, maybe less, the diesel generator which powered the lights, chilled the corpsicles, and kept Millie’s servers online would run out of fuel. They would have to leave when that happened. The question was where would they go?

“I keep thinking one of these unincorporated spots would be good places to check first,” he said, tapping a region south and a little east of where they were. “Spots where the fire might have reached but the stuff from the Crystal Empire may not have.”

Vik held the blanket of coats in place as she shimmied over to Pike’s side of the heap to get a better look. The great northwestern forest extended east along the border mountains for hundreds of miles, but geography and climate conspired to limit its southern expanse to only one or two hundred miles and pretty patchy ones at that. Lacking any outside information, they’d agreed to assume that most of the forest was probably still burning even now and so it represented their chief obstacle. Still, Vik had reservations about setting tiny, no-name villages as their first waypoints on their way to civilization.

“They’ll have a lot less to offer than Buckskin Bay,” she murmured. “Maybe nothing by now if there were survivors like us.”

He grimaced at that. “Might not be a bad thing to find others.”

“No,” she agreed, and she wasn’t willing just yet to give voice to that paranoid part of her who knew what it was like to live in scarcity. Hunger had a way of alleviating people of the burden of morality. “But what if we skipped the forest completely? If we follow the beach we’re bound to find a boat.”

He eyed her at that. “You want to get on a boat?”

She eyed him back, but only because Pike knew all about her little phobias. “I’m being practical.”

Seeing that she didn’t want to be hectored over her fear of deep water, he turned back to the atlas and gave it a considering look. “Boats need fuel unless you know how to sail, and you said the fire got hot enough to cook off both of the gas stations. Still… it’s something. Grab me a pen?”

Vik shucked off the coats and retrieved a ballpoint from the desk drawer. She jostled his shoulder as she reburied herself and held the pen out to him, half expecting him to take it between his teeth like an earth pony. But he swept it up in his tenuous magic, drew a bracket down the coastline, and labeled it: Boat?

She smiled self consciously as he drew tiny tick marks beside the three nearest coastal towns. It never hurts to feel heard. Then without warning her jaw muscles hauled her mouth open in a powerful yawn. Her day’s labor was finally running her down, and early too. Millie hadn’t even gotten around to dimming the lights to dark.

“You look beat,” Pike observed sympathetically.

“Mmh,” she grunted, yet she still lifted a finger toward the map’s bottom margin. “What about Las Pegasus?”

He hesitated and looked at her, unsure if she was being serious. “That’s almost eight hundred miles away.”

She shrugged and found herself resting against his shoulder. “Yeah, but they got blackjack and hookers. Worth the walk.”

“Uh huh. And whose bits are we hiking all that way to spend?”

“Yours, duh. I’m broke.”

He chuckled at that and she responded with a tired grin of her own. They sat there for a while, and for his part Pike didn’t try to shrug her off. She was grateful for that. They considered the map in silence, each aware that they were only guessing at which route would serve them best and neither having any evidence to prop up one over the other. It was hopeful daydreaming, nothing more. Just something to keep them moving forward.

“You know,” he mused, “I think you saved my life.”

For a second she thought he was bringing up the pact she’d cajoled him into agreeing to, but when she tilted her head up to look at him she could tell he was thinking of something a little less dark. “How so?”

He shrugged the shoulder not occupied by her cheek. “Well, if you’d chosen anywhere else to put down stakes then I wouldn’t have met you in the hospital. They wouldn’t have fired me and I’d probably have been working there instead of here when… you know, when it happened.”

The maps were forgotten now as she sat up a little straighter so she could regard him with a dubious smile. “Happy to help, I guess? Pike, you know you don’t owe me for–”

He kissed her. Just a tentative peck to judge her response, but it startled her enough to make her forget what she’d been saying. Minutes seemed to drift by instead of the three or four seconds they filled with unsteady silence. It was long enough for Vik to come to two very quick conclusions.

First, that she’d known something like this had been building between them long before the bombs had fallen.

Second, that she was annoyed he’d beaten her to it.

With her heart thundering in her chest, she reached out with one hand and took the atlas from him. She flung it away as the other hand slid around the back of his neck, fingers locking around his untidy mane, and pulled herself up to his widening eyes to steal a kiss of her own.

She didn’t think either of them would be sleeping anytime soon.

November 18th, 1077
Day 19

“You can go faster,” he called.

“This thing only has one speed,” she answered, eyeing the button beneath the pad of her thumb as if to make sure. “It might break if you force it.”

He mimicked a rimshot with his mouth and Vik momentarily considered magneting the control switch back onto the hoist’s frame and letting him swing in the elevator shaft for a while as punishment. The last two nights had been an exercise in working out the limitations of their anatomies, namely her ability to accommodate his, and Pike was not a colt in a candy store when it came to relaxing his filters. It turned out he’d been harboring some unprofessional feelings for her even longer than she’d been eyeing him. Imagine that.

“The Element of Stand Up, everyone,” she deadpanned, and generously kept her thumb pressed against the green UP button.

Now that they’d scrounged up enough extension cords to plug the hoist into Millie’s dwindling power supply, shoving the thing into position so the boom could hang over the hole had been a simple matter of applying leverage and profanity until it was secure. Being made to lift engines out of carriages it wasn’t strictly designed to wind up thirty feet of cable, but the electric winch she’d seen in the quick lube shop had. Any trained mechanic unfortunate enough to witness the bastardization of science Vik created would have turned right around and gotten as far from the liability nightmare as they could.

For Vik’s part, she thought she’d done a halfway decent job. The winch wasn’t in great condition, what with the insulation partially melted off the wires, but she’d gotten one of the mounting bolts tightened through part of the hoist’s frame and the other end tied to it with a length of climbing rope and several pretty good knots. The hook at the end of the boom was large enough to thread the winch cable through, and at the end of it they’d cobbled together a bench out of some two-by-fours and an eyebolt to attach it all to.

Pike had even bounced on it a few times to see if it would hold, and it had. So take that, safety inspectors.

“I can’t believe this worked,” he said as his head broke the rubble’s surface. “I thought I was going to be stuck–”

The words and his grin faded as he received his first glimpse of the town’s blackened remains. He remained silent as Vik pulled the arm of the hoist away from the hole, momentarily unaware that he could get down from the boards. “Empty night,” he breathed.

“Yeah.” She tugged his foreleg away from the cable and he allowed her to help him onto the charred plywood she’d set out earlier. “It’s not great. Do you need a minute?”

He nodded, dumbstruck by the transformation of the town he’d called home his entire life. She waited beside him as he chewed the corner of his lip, his eyes misting over as he took in the slice of destruction visible beyond the ashen parking lot. Then he took in a breath and slowly exhaled as he regained his composure.

“Okay,” he whispered, then more firmly, “okay. Give me the tour.”

She nodded, led him down the rubble to the concrete bollard at the edge of where the weather enclosure once stood, and untied the strap to the sled and its cargo of empty saddlebags. At the cartoon depiction of a wintertime Pinkie Pie he arched an eyebrow at her, which she dutifully ignored, then followed as it scraped noisily behind them.

He’d asked for the tour, but Vik had already decided not to show him everything. Not all at once. Today she wanted to limit their exploration to Central Avenue where the most fruitful scavenging was limited thanks to many of the businesses built there being of cinder block construction, rather than wood.

They started west, toward the beach and dark waves of the ocean. He was quick to recognize the amber gravel clustered along the gutters for the hazard they were and avoided going near them. Usually, that was possible, but sometimes they would come to larger pieces of the Crystal Empire which forced them onto the sidewalk or out onto the pavement. Each time they stepped over that string of gutter pebbles she would get a faint whiff and flavor of hot metal.

She showed him the corner grocery which had mostly burned down but within which there was a void between the shelving units where she’d found the majority of their canned food. Once her hands and his hooves were black from digging through the soot, and their modest haul of fourteen cans and three intact and partially cooked Sparkle-Cola bottles were safely in the sled, she gave the broken window they’d entered through an uncertain frown before leading Pike further on.

Most of the buildings they passed on their way to the waterfront were seasonal shops dedicated to the tourist industry.

“I haven’t actually checked these yet,” she admitted.

“Why not?”

She grunted. “Can’t eat personalized keychains. See that?”

Across the street was the blackened storefront of what had once been a saltwater taffy business. The front door still stood partially bent where she’d hauled it out of its warped frame and onto the sidewalk. Scrubbed into the soot-stained wall beside it was a faint X.

“I’ve been marking the ones I’ve been in,” she explained. “The X means I didn’t find anything we could eat.”

Pike frowned at the taffy shop. “Really?”

“Fire got everything in there, even the rum toffee.”

His lip twitched in a faint smile, but it didn’t last. “I used to go there all the time as a colt. My grandma actually had to tell the owner I wasn’t to spend my allowance there anymore after I came home and sicked up on her nice couch. Hard to believe it’s gone. I try not to think about what it must have been like for her in the end. Alone and confused in that fucking…”

He let out a sigh and trailed off. Instinctively, she reached out and put her hand on the back of his neck and began stroking his mane to comfort him. Then it occurred to her she was trying to sooth him the same way she’d once pet the stray dogs back home, and she abruptly stopped.

He gave her a confused look when she did. “What’s wrong?”

She opened her mouth to respond, closed it, then forced herself to speak anyway. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to make it weird.”

Now he was smiling. “Vik, we are way past the point where a little physical contact can make it weird.”

The heat running up her neck was a welcome distraction from her brief embarrassment, so she slung her free arm around his broad shoulders and tugged him over until his foreleg sacheted against her hip as they walked. The world might have ended, and they may be the only ones left alive to endure it, but the simple act of sharing his warmth made it all a little more bearable.

Even the simple act of sliding her fingers through his coat made her feel grounded in a way she wished she hadn’t waited this long to experience. Whether or not this was a fling or something lasting, neither of them could say for sure, but Vik intended to lavish in it for as long as she could.

It had been early afternoon when Pike stepped off the hoist and by the time they’d turned back with their full sled the sun was already halfway sunken below the horizon. With the early onset of night came the deepening chill that foreshadowed approaching winter. Neither of them wanted to think too much about what they’d do once the snow fell.

Once in a while Vik had to jostle the sled behind her to knock loose the amber pebbles which caught beneath its leading edge. They knew from Millie’s constant needling and the frustratingly vague information communicated by the ministries that radiation could be dangerous and even make them sick, but nothing more than that. Even Millie, having once been connected to Robronco’s vast libraries of information, knew next to nothing about radiation beyond a few stray reports on the illnesses it caused during test detonations. For now, at least, the best medicine was to avoid touching anything that glowed.

Vik, however, was beginning to notice that everything out here glowed after sundown. She winced at the faint, almost urine-tinted underglow of the clouds traveling the darkened sky overhead.

“There’s a light on,” Pike said.

She nodded uneasily. “It’s everywhere after dark.”

Then she realized he was slowing and she looked down at him to see him shaking his head. His attention wasn’t on the glow, but rather the heat-blistered bones of the hospital building across the road.

“Not that,” he insisted, pointing his horn toward the building. “Seaside. There’s a light on in there. Do you see it?”

They stopped in the middle of the road to look and she realized that she did see it. A single, guttering flicker deep within the ruined first floor. Too rapid to be a leftover fire, she realized, and the wrong color. It was a sterile, white light. Fluorescent light. When did that come on? Or had it always been on and she just hadn’t been willing to slow down enough to spot it?

“There might be other survivors,” he half-whispered, and Vik understood immediately that she would be able to do nothing to stem the tide of hope rushing through him. Almost at once he began crossing toward the hospital instead of their shelter and the promise of rest. “And the emergency generator! Seaside’s a hospital, they have to have a better generator than ours!”

“Pike, slow down! You don’t know if it’s safe!”

To her relief he did slow down, just enough to look back from the edge of the hospital parking lot and regard her with unshielded incredulity. “There might be people trapped in there, just like we were. If we can help them…”

They’ll be burned up down there, nothing but blackened dead things with screams frozen on their twisted expressions.

She wanted to argue but she could already see that he would go in with or without her. Swallowing, she shot the burnt out floors an uneasy frown before conceding. “Fine, just… go slow.”

They went slow.

Pike led the way, aiming them straight for the hospital’s main entrance and the dim flicker deep within. Even in the aftermath of the firestorm there were still visible markers of the panicked rush for shelter. Both sets of automatic sliding doors were caved inward. Where an orderly row of empty wheelchairs waited in the vestibule for disabled patients, most had been overturned or crushed.

Among the twisted aluminum frames, Vik glimpsed a partially visible equine shape. Its charred skin had split open down a shrunken hind leg like a cooked roast and she could see the ashen gray flesh beneath. Her gorge rose with sudden ferocity, but she held it down because Pike hadn’t seen what lay among the wheelchairs and she didn’t want him to go looking.

His hooves and her feet squelched as they made their way across the main lobby’s soaked carpet, the fire suppression system having been insufficient to extinguish a conflagration that consumed an entire town. The result was a thick, wet paste of muddy ashes which had once been the lobby’s ceiling tiles.

“Careful,” Pike murmured, his tone becoming solemn as they ventured past the desolation of what used to be a wide, mahogany reception desk and the spikework of blown out and melted electronics it once held. “Don’t step on that.”

Vik offered no snappy comment to reassure him. It was dark enough that she very might well have walked through the lumpy remains of reception were she not keeping one hand on his flank for guidance.

The lobby continued beyond reception on either end where the central elevator bank had been tastefully disguised with a wall of plaques naming the many donors who contributed to the medical center over the years. Most of the plaques had fallen into a shallow pile of briquettes against the wall, but a few still clung stubbornly to their posts. They passed these soot shrouded names without stopping to read them, nor would they notice the charred remnant of the largest plaque on the floor which thanked Stable-Tec for its generous patronage. Their attention was focused entirely on the light fixture dangling from its one remaining chain behind, the single unshattered tube tink-tink-tinking as it guttered.

It did so from within the open door of the hospital’s emergency stairwell.

“Déjà fucking vu,” Vik muttered, and felt the tiny bit vindicated when she saw the same look of unease in Pike’s eyes.

After a brief hesitation, he leaned toward the open stairwell and called. “Hello? Is anyone down there?”

His forlorn echo reverberated for several long seconds before finally dissipating. Nobody answered. Twice more he called out, louder each time, and twice more they were greeted with ghostly silence. Then, to Vik’s alarm, he started walking onto the landing.

“Pike,” she hissed.

He stopped, careful not to run into the dangling light as he turned his head toward her with rising impatience. “You said go slow.”

She had, and he was. And yet she couldn’t shake the unreasonable fear that each breath they took was nudging at the foundations of a house of cards that could drop on both of them. They had just freed themselves from one tomb and she’d finally begun to feel hopeful that her supply gathering was building up to something that could sustain them until help arrived. Pike was treating this burned shell of a hospital as if it couldn’t give in to gravity and kill them right now, all their progress be damned!

“We should come back when there’s daylight,” she offered lamely.

He gestured down the stairwell where the glow of several other lights illuminated the painted cinder blocks. “You can wait outside if you need to, but I have to be sure. I used to work with these people. Some of them were my friends.”

Friends or not, she knew he’d smelled the pungent odor of rot coming up the stairwell as clearly as she did. Without any conscious effort, her free hand began to curl into a fist and she realized she was getting ready to punch the fire scarred wall next to the door. She quickly relaxed her grip. The amount of times she’d been this quick to anger could be counted on that same hand with just two digits to spare. The most recent instance had been the incident that caused her to flee her homeland, and before that…

“Okay,” she said, barely able to suppress a grimace as she said it. “Just….”

He regarded her with a tense, if not warm smile and nodded. “Slow. I will. Come on.”

Their descent was short. Seaside Hospital only had two sublevels to speak of, but they were so eerily similar to the ones Vik and Pike resided in that they both felt an unwelcome feeling of vertigo when they made the connection. The first sublevel was dedicated to maintenance and facilities. The bottom was reserved for the hospital morgue.

The latter they knew only from the large, block style letters painted at the bottom of the stairwell, because there they discovered the bodies of those who fled belowground sprawled over the steps and heaped together on the floor. They lay as if they’d settled down for a nap and never woke. If there had been violence, neither she or Pike could see the signs. Where a pegasus had reclined against the stairwell door, propping it open behind his back, more corpses were visible in the wedge of hallway beyond.

Then Vik saw the stains which marked where relaxing muscles of the dead had leaked, and her mind finally pieced together the foul odor with its origin. She bent away from Pike and retched a stream of half-digested lunch into the corner of the landing. Almost immediately Pike did the same. It was too much for both of them, and they retreated back up to the lobby where the air was fresher and the horrors safely shrouded by the shadows.

As they retrieved the sled and dragged it back to the hoist, neither of them noticed one of their saddlebags of supplies had gone missing.

November 19th, 1077
Day 20

Vik absently rubbed her thumb against the walkie’s transmit key while she stared out at the frozen cylinders beyond the office window. She’d climbed the rope up the shaft, run the hoist for Pike, then came back down as soon as he started back for the hospital. He hadn’t pressed her to come with him this time. He knew after last night she needed a break.

“...ound the generator, I think. Not seeing…”

A wave of static drowned him out for a few moments.

“...aside from diesel?”

Vik pressed the transmit key. “They’re using diesel?”

A pause. “No, I asked if you… any ideas what this thing is running on aside…”

Static, again.

This time Millie spoke up. “You’d get clearer reception if you were near the elevator shaft.”

Vik ignored her. She wasn’t in the mood. She squeezed the key again. “If it’s not burning diesel then it’s using gasoline. Is there a fuel level indicator anywhere?”

“...either. Luna’s left teat, it stinks in here. I…” More static. “...got something. Yeah, wait a second, I think this is the service manual.”

The blend of static and sound of pages flipping made for an unpleasant combination.

“...igh voltage transformer. But if this is just a…” A squawk of interference, then he was back and his tone radiated excitement. “...operty of Stable-Tec Incorporated. Vik, this isn’t a gen…”

This time the radio clicked off as his tenuous magic lost its grip on the transmit key again. A moment later he was back, the speaker suddenly muddy when he spoke but surprisingly intelligible given he’d resorted to holding the thing and the fiddly key between his teeth.

“Thishish ‘etting ‘ecktricity rumma Shtable.”

She blinked at that. “Wait, the apocalypse jockeys with the tinfoil hats?”

“Yesh!”

Vik sat in her chair, frowning down at the radio in her hand. Then she looked up to the black hemisphere mounted in the center of the ceiling. “What do you know about Stable-Tec?”

Millie’s response was almost convincing in its dismissiveness. “Twelve CryoLife employees list Stable-Tec Incorporated as the primary beneficiary in their life insurance policy, ten of which also have them listed as a beneficiary to their retirement fund.”

“...you shtill ‘ere?”

She pressed the key, not taking her eyes off Millie. “Still here. I think you should start heading back.”

“O’ay,” and he clicked off the air.

She set her own radio down. “What else, Millie?”

A pause. “Stable-Tec owns a ten percent share of CryoLife. Their chief executive officer has a standing reservation with the company to have her body put into stasis in the event of her death. Beyond that, you know as much about Stable-Tec as I do.”

Nothing about that satisfied Vik. “Is there a Stable near Buckskin Bay?”

A longer pause. “Were I to hazard a guess, I would presume Stable-Tec didn’t usurp the board of directors’ immediate family as beneficiaries through good will alone. It’s likely that this may have been a condition they were required to fulfill in order to obtain residency within a local Stable.”

Vik pushed out of her chair and started the familiar walk back to the elevator shaft. Pike couldn’t enter or leave without her up there to work the hoist.

Without breaking a stride, she said, “Do I need to ask you to check everything you have on those servers?”

“Already zero point three percent complete,” Millie chimed back. “Contrary to the usual office paranoia, I don’t record everything I see and hear, but I do retain a lot of it. I’ll tell you what I find. It’ll go quicker if I disable active listening for the duration.”

“Do it,” she said. “We’ll talk when you’re done.”

“That’s them.”

“What are they doing?”

“Looks like they’re digging up more cable.”

“Why?”

“Not so loud. I don’t know. Maybe there’s no more food.”

“There is. They took it all.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Fucking dragon. Carnivore bitch.”

“Ripple, shut the fuck up.”

“You shut up. You know what happens when she runs out of food?”

“Ripple…”

“She eats her stallion buddy, then she’s gonna sniff us out. Fucking carnivore.”

“If she could smell us she’d have already found us by now, and I’ve seen you eat your share of gryphon food so shut up with the carnivore shit. It’s getting old fast.”

“So is starving. It’s gonna start snowing soon, Sift. What the fuck are we going to do then?”

“I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”

“You better hope we do.”

“I said we will.”

“Fat lot of good saying it did for Sandstone. Fat lot of good it’s doing for me. This is survival, Silt. You know it, I know it, and that fucking dragon knows it. She ain’t stupid. She knows we’re a threat.”

“She doesn’t have a clue we’re here.”

“Bet she does. Stealing that saddlebag was stupid.”

“You’re the one who grabbed it!”

“I didn’t see you turning your nose up at those beets this morning. Too late now, anyway. We’re on opposite sides now. Us versus them. That’s survival, Sift. It ain’t nice, but it’ll be even less nice if you and I starve to death this winter. We need that food. It’s our food. Equestrian food.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Yeah, well nothing. There’s not enough for all four of us. Not after the fire. Do you feel like starving?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“Well alright then.”

November 20th, 1077
Day 21

Vik flung the spool of salvaged cable across the street in a high, tumbling arc and the far end landed on the pavement with a dry splat. Neither end was connected to power, that would come once they had all the wire laid out and secured so it wouldn’t pull apart. Where two different colored cables joined together she had wrapped a fist-sized bolus of duct tape around Pike’s splice job. That adhesive was likely to stay put for the next couple of centuries, at which point it wouldn’t be their problem anymore anyway.

It was the work of less than an hour to set the cable out and find enough material to cover it with. Neither of them wanted to forget where it was and end up dragging the next heavy thing they needed over the top of it. Once they had the daisy chain of cable suitably protected and marked, they set about tying the CryoLife end of the cable into the sublevel’s butchered electrical system.

Only after they had finished their work, eaten their night’s meal - canned beets and water - and lay down to sleep did the tidal bore of carefully ignored anxiety wash over them. Vik had trembled so badly that her teeth began to chatter. She eventually calmed down with Pike’s help, the pair of them forcing themselves to take slow, deep breaths until the worst of the adrenaline dump passed.

Connecting their lifeboat beneath CryoLife to the wellspring of electricity coming from the Stable-Tec junction across the street, they had needed to shut off the diesel generator to work. Millie had supplied them with detailed instructions on how to disconnect the generator from the breaker box it poured juice into, most importantly how to do it without electrocuting themselves in the process, but the act of disconnecting the generator which they credited with their survival had been a pure leap of faith.

When they were done, Vik alone returned to the hospital and flipped the open breaker they’d routed their makeshift power cord into. She’d all but sprinted back to the elevator shaft to see if they hadn’t made a terrible mistake and had been relieved beyond words to see the lights at the bottom glowing again.

They were too strung out to even consider making love. Pike nodded off first with Vik wrapped in his forelegs, her crest pressed to one side by the weight of his chin. The sound of his steady breath was more than she needed to fall asleep, finally comfortable in the knowledge that neither of them would be freezing this winter.

As she dozed, she wondered if this wasn’t a sign that they were going to be okay.

November 27th, 1077
Day 28

Vik hoisted herself up the rope hand over hand, the exercise having become a familiar routine that she was actually beginning to enjoy. The elevator shaft didn’t scare her anymore, not on the way up at least, and today she was making a solo outing which meant she could decide which deathtraps to plunder and which to pass by. Pike was becoming a regular daredevil when it came to scavenging the town ruins and this morning he was feeling too nauseated for a hike around town, especially now that winter had properly arrived.

Clean, white powder crunched beneath the sole of her foot as she stood up at the lip of the hole. A deep shiver drilled itself through her as she stood waiting for her body to catch up with the temperature. After a few minutes the worst of the biting cold had subsided to something closer to standing in front of an open refrigerator, and she started down the snow covered rubble to unbury the sled.

After tipping out the snow and resetting the three sets of saddlebags, down one since they’d started and which was still a source of background irritation since neither of them could figure out where it had fallen out, Vik checked in with Pike over the radio and started for the invisible line where Central Avenue exited the town and became Old Highway 19. Today wasn’t a day for gathering food. It was a day for gathering information.

Pike’s voice came over the radio clear as a bell, and Vik tried not to worry about how it would inevitably deteriorate with distance. “Millie wants you to check the snow for ash when you have a minute.”

She’d barely gotten out of the parking lot. Millie never wasted a second when it came to worrying. Easier to do it now rather than to put it off and risk a lecture. She bent to one knee and swiped away the top layer of fresh snow and saw only a few specks of what might be ash or just from her own hand.

“It’s clean outside the elevator. I’ll check again when I’m further away, but I don’t think we’ve been in the path of any ashfall since the zebras pushed the button.” In truth, none of the apocalyptic nightmare stories of blackening skies and endless night they’d been warned of had come to pass. Just yesterday she and Pike had spotted a pair of cardinals twittering away along the door frame of a burnt carriage, and that didn’t seem like something the end of the world would have in it.

Still, that wouldn’t satisfy Millie’s paranoid mind, so she added an appeasing, “I’ll let you know if anything changes,” and signed off.

The reason today wasn’t slotted for food gathering could be credited entirely to Millie anyway, and Vik didn’t see the harm in letting the artificial mind preen a bit at her own success. It had taken significantly longer than she or Pike expected for her to dig up something valuable from the vast storage medium of her memory. She had been an idle witness to a conversation between two members of the board, both stallions well past middle age and whose friendship stretched all the way back to a chance meeting during a cider press demonstration put on by the company’s eccentric sibling cofounders. The aging board members had arrived to the fourth floor conference room for a meeting Millie had been prepared to take down the minutes for, and though she hadn’t strictly instructed to record any conversation prior to starting, she had since developed a habit of storing a clear text dictation of the pre-meeting audio to help her stay aware of changes in their relationships.

The elder of the two had complained that he expected to have his ear chewed by his daughter once she learned he was going to miss his granddaughter’s 12th birthday, a party to which he had assured the filly he would be present for. The younger had offered his sympathy and said he would be leaving his wife at the house alone to deal with the contractors who were in the process of renovating it, a task he didn’t trust her to do well without his oversight. Alas, they had both agreed these were small sacrifices for peace of mind, and the elder had made the hopeful throwaway comment within which Millie hadn’t originally detected the capital S.

“It’s not a long drive at least, and thank Celestia for that. I don’t know if my back could handle a full day of Stable training after spending much time in one of those damned carriages. Makes me wish for the days when ponies weren’t so afraid of taking a long walk.”

The three of them had listened to her replay the audio over a breakfast of canned sweet corn and a cereal bar Vik was sure had more sugar than cereal gluing it together. They’d already surmised that any nearby Stable would lay somewhere to the east, but to hear that it was within driving distance and potentially hiking distance had spurred an uncanny level of optimism within them. Old Highway 19 was littered with hidden driveways and lumber roads, but a company like Stable-Tec surely wouldn’t plan an evacuation of paying residents to pick their way through some unfortunate local’s front yard or a minefield of stumps and tree cuttings, would they?

Not with the money they can throw around, Vik thought as she set out down Central Avenue. Stable-Tec wasn’t about to charge its customers a fortune each for entry just to beg the local yokels for road access. They’d build their own damn road and maybe a couple extra just in case. Pike thought they’d be a little more cagey than that. Big, flashy shots of those giant gear-shaped doors were one thing, but advertising their location with road signs and neon arrows was begging for trouble. After all, what was the point of a bomb shelter for the super wealthy if in the end anyone with a rusted out carriage could roll up the drive and join the fun for free?

So Vik spent the day trudging through shallow drifts of fresh snow with the pink sled trailing after her with its constant, papery hiss. When she came upon the snarl of wrecked traffic half a mile into the burnt expanse of black toothpicks which had until recently been a verdant expanse of spruce and pine, she steeled herself to finally check over the few carriages which looked as if they’d been spared the worst of the flames. Instead of useful goods, she found fresh tool marks pressed into the seams where trunk lids and doors latched shut.

She’d felt a flutter of hope at seeing this and had promptly turned in a quick circle to see if she might spot any signs of other survivors. But the forest only stood around her in that too-quiet, eerie vacancy that a breezeless winter day could offer. She listened for a while, straining to hear anything which might point her toward a shelter or even an outdoor camp, but whoever had looted these vehicles had clearly done so before the snow had fallen. The only tracks she saw were her own, and she couldn’t shake the dread that she’d missed their one chance at contacting someone still left alive.

She’d gone to the edge of the road and pried up a cold chunk of gravel from under the snow, intending to turn one of the burnt carriages as a blackboard onto which she would scratch a message. Then she’d stopped, the stone hovering an inch over the hood of a carriage pointing away from town, and thought about their supplies.

Millie had calculated what they’d brought down would last them into spring, and only with strict rationing. What if this other group of survivors was bigger than theirs? She and Pike had already checked the most plentiful spots in town for food and it was only getting harder to find any cans or containers that hadn’t burst open or cooked to charcoal in the fire. At the dwindling rate they were finding edible food they were pretty sure they would have to leave their underground shelter well before summer came. The discovery of continuous electricity had been wonderful, but that wouldn’t stop them from starving once the food ran out. What would it do to their timeline if they ran into others?

A cold breeze sifted through the torchwood forest and a fresh shiver ran down her back as she listened to the rising clatter of dead branches. Eventually she dropped the stone into the snow and resumed her search, uncertainty dogging her heels for the rest of the day.

December 10th, 1077
Day 41

“Good morning, friends.”

Pike cracked one eye open long enough to see that Millie had begun increasing the brightness of the overhead lights. He held back the customary groan of irritation, not wanting to wake Vik who still lay with her back warming against the cup of his belly. Every time he woke with her beside him he had to do a double-take to make sure this was actually real. Not the end of the world part, that he was very sure had really happened, but the part where he’d taken a stupid risk by kissing his longtime friend and colleague and she’d actually kissed him back.

For those first few minutes he grappled with all those old insecurities he thought he’d grown out of a decade ago, and he would lay there worrying she may only be showing affection as a way to repay him for all he’d sacrificed to help her make a home here. What if she viewed this as her end of a transaction? What if, after they left Buckskin Bay and found other survivors, she decided being in a relationship with someone without scales was too improper? Would she feel obligated to seek out her own kind back in her homeland and help repopulate? It sure came up enough in all the post-apocalyptic movies he’d watched. The asteroid hits, or some disease wipes everyone out, and it’s every pony’s duty to procreate and save the species, especially the lead actor and the bombshell mare.

Vik lifted her hand, rubbed a thumb along the base of her left horn, and took in a deep, waking breath. Then she turned slightly to see if he was awake, saw that he was, and the smile that drew across her muzzle was like watching the summer solstice fireworks display. In an instant, all his worries evaporated. He shifted away a little as she rolled over to face him, her tail grazing a part of him that always seemed to wake up well before his brain ever caught on, and she shamelessly slid her leg into his groin to steal some of its warmth for herself.

“Good morning, friends,” Millie repeated.

“Mmhm,” Vik murmured, letting the coy chuckle slip into the utterance as she agreed wholeheartedly with Millie’s sentiment. She kissed him, a gift he eagerly returned, then settled down and started running her fingers through the dense winter coat he’d begun to grow. “God, you are so soft.”

It took a lot to make Pike blush, and yet that managed to raise the color beneath the sawdust shade of his thickening coat. Unable to suppress a wolfish grin, he pressed his lips to her forehead and murmured, “Says the mare with her leg on my beanpole.”

Vik jerked with the force of her sudden, snorting laugh. For all her attempts at stoicism she had no defense for Pike’s shameless love for terrible lines. Their first several nights and mornings following that gamble of a kiss had been an enthusiastic, yet somewhat frenzied exercise in each of them showing the other how deep their wells of pent up carnal energy could draw. Then they had managed to contain themselves enough to slow down, focus on the sheer pleasure of exploration, and out of that came the much more comfortable, richer nature with which they teased each other now.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” she said once she’d beaten back her fit of giggles, and the fingers which had stroked his coat were suddenly wrapped beneath the slightly flared head of his cock. “I’m not a mare, I’m a dragoness. Those two extra syllables stand for mysterious and exotic. Fancy-fancy, spicy-spicy. Yes?”

He nodded with an eager grin. “Fancy-fancy, spicy-spicy. Got it.”

She raised one brow and her grip on him tightened just enough to coax a faint kick from his hind hooves. At that, her grin widened. “And this,” she stated pointedly, “is not a beanpole. It’s a goddamned siege engine.”

“Yup,” he agreed, though he was sure he’d agree to just about anything now that he’d seen her other hand descending to join the first. His voice went husky at the extremely welcome contact. “Siege… something.”

Hands. The things she’d shown she could do to him with just those hands.

And then Millie proceeded to kick down the figurative bedroom door and turn the lights up to full brightness. “Good morning, friends,” she repeated for the thrice, and had she turned her own volume up that time too? “I am so glad to see you both healthy and awake. How do you feel today, Pike? You certainly appear to have regained some of your energy since you fell ill.”

At the mental image of a faceless robot cooly observing Vik’s hands working away at his cock, every drop of testosterone in his body vanished at once. A glance at Vik showed him an equal if not more visceral physical frustration in the set of her jaw, and sure enough a quick look between them confirmed she’d been in the process of guiding him toward her just as the mood had been thoroughly shattered.

“I’m going to uninstall her,” she growled.

“Don’t,” he murmured just loud enough for her microphones to pick up, “I kinda like it when she watches.”

“Wonderful,” Millie piped with a surprisingly good simulation of sudden disgust, “I may just save you both the trouble and corrupt my own data myself.”

“If you’d stop watching us you wouldn’t have that problem,” Vik shot back, and Pike felt a flicker of comradery between them. Team Organic vs. Team Robot. Damn right. “Seriously, Mills, you gotta learn boundaries.”

At that, Millie shifted back to the same, sniffing librarian’s tone she’d all but perfected by now. “It is entirely beyond my capabilities to anticipate what the two of you are getting up to when I activate this viewpoint. And besides, there are more important things for you to be doing that don’t involve… intersecting.”

Pike thought if his dick retreated any faster he’d have heard it smack into the back of his sheath. “Cool,” he grumbled, “I love that I hate that word now.”

As for Vik, she’d managed to catch the edge of foreshadowing Millie had been aiming for. Pike let out a reluctant sigh as she scooted up to a sitting position, officially squashing any chance that they might wriggle their way back to some early morning riding lessons.

“What happened?”

Pike sat up beside her to listen.

“Two items of note,” Millie reported, pausing for effect just long enough to coax an irritated grumble from Vik. “First, there is a significant deposit of what appears to be snow inside the freight elevator shaft. If so, it would indicate heavy snowfall consistent with the season.”

He sighed and let the back of his head thud against the office wall. “That’s probably the end of our Stable hunting,” he muttered.

Vik nodded in silent agreement. Unless someone out there had miraculously revived a road plow, their treks out along Old Highway 19 had very likely come to an end. Even her native ability to adapt to inclement temperatures had a limit, and Pike wasn’t completely convinced her hikes through the snow had been all that safe for her to begin with.

“And second?” he asked.

“The radio upstairs has picked up a voice,” she stated as if it were no matter of consequence at all, and yet Pike and Vik were up and moving for the door as soon as the words fell from her speaker.

They had left the little desk radio powered on and set to the frequency Millie indicated had been the standard band for the Equestrian Emergency Broadcast System. She knew as much because it was noted in the company employee manual under the category Hazardous Weather. And while the frequency wasn’t warning them of an approaching thunderstorm, Pike could hear the faint but unmistakable whisper behind the static.

The message, to his growing frustration, was beyond deciphering. “What’re they saying?”

“Can’t tell,” Vik murmured.

He watched her tweak the tuning knob and listened to the voice vanish, return, and sink again beneath a sea of interference. A few feet away, frigid air wafted down the snow-crusted elevator shaft. It really had come down last night, he thought.

Then Vik did something odd. She picked up the wire trailing out the back of the radio, which led all the way up to the ramshackle antenna at the top of the rubble pile. For a moment he worried she was about to give it a good, hard tug and was relieved when she didn’t. She just sat there, holding the antenna wire in one hand while she worked the knob with the fingertips of the other, and Pike realized the voices were coming through a little clearer. Not much, but it wasn’t nothing.

His eyebrows shot up when Vik dropped the wire and dragged her forked tongue over her palm, coating it with spittle. Maybe he was finally losing it, he thought, because when she gripped the antenna again the ghostly voice leapt out of the static.

“...nder Flathoof of the Equestrian Military. Blue Alert. Blue Alert. Blue Alert. All active, reserve, and retired armed service members who receive this message are required to report to the following coordinates: 40° 42' 50.3994", -73° 43' 24.2394". We have secured food, water, and shelter for all those able and willing to act in the defense of their nation. We are here. You are not alone. Message repeats. This is Acting Commander Flathoof of the Equestrian Military. Blue Alert. Blue Alert. Blue Alert. All active…”

Pike met Vik’s widening eyes, then looked up to the nearest of Millie’s unblinking black hemispheres. “What’s at those coordinates?”

A pause. “The dockyards of the Manehattan shipping ports.”

“Manehattan.” His heart dropped into his stomach like a lead weight. “The other side of the fucking country.”

Beside him, Vik let go of the wire and rubbed at the same spot above her left eye she always did when she was stressed. “Yeah. Not ideal.”

He chewed the inside of his lip, nodding. “You could fly there, though. Right?”

The look she gave him as he made the suggestion was sharp enough to cut steel. “Shut up right now. Get that idea out of your head.”

He regarded her for a long moment but she didn’t break her stare. Finally he looked away and nodded, once. He’d only made the suggestion once before, not long after they’d set off the gas bottle that blew the top off the elevator shaft. It hadn’t gone over well then, and her reaction to hearing it brought up a second time had been comparatively worse. There was no reticence in her eyes. No subconscious calculation. The message was the same: if he was grounded, she was too.

Once she’d calmed, she spoke. “We can make that walk. It’ll take a long time, and we’d have to figure out a way to carry Millie with us, but if there are people alive out there it means the bombs didn’t hit everywhere.”

He pressed his lips into a reluctant line and couldn’t seem to grasp the same thread of optimism Vik was finding. They were talking thousands of miles on hoof with no guarantee they would find enough food or water to keep them going. And what if he got sick again? Vik obviously wasn’t as sensitive to the radiation all those glowing shards were putting out, and he didn’t think she could cart him along for long before she wore herself out.

Even now he wasn’t sure he was completely well. The nausea was mostly gone, but he still felt off. Like how he would feel when he first keyed in on an oncoming cold. Not sick, exactly, but not one hundred percent either. He didn’t like thinking about what might happen if he caught another case of the radiation pukes once they were too far out to turn around.

He didn’t realize she’d placed a hand on his shoulder until he felt it squeeze.

“We’re not going anywhere yet,” she said in that patient, reassuring tone he’d so often used on her whenever this new home she’d fled to verged on overwhelming her. “We have all winter to decide where we’re going, and we have our own supercomputer to come up with the safest route. Right, Millie?”

“Technically I do not meet the qualifications to be called a super–”

“Right, Millie?”

A pause. “Yes. Quite right. In truth I’ve come to be somewhat fond of you two, and not entirely due to my continued existence being inextricably tied to your own.”

Vik gestured meaningfully toward the black dome above the open elevator doors. “See? We even got the robot uprising rooting for us.” She gave his shoulder a gentle shake, making him look up and meet her gaze. “It’ll be hard going for a while, but you and I made a pact and dragons never welch on a promise. You and me, big guy. We’re going to make it.”

December 18th, 1077
Day 49

Vik shuffled forward, her foot settling over and then punching through the thin crust of ice, then repeated the same motion with the other. The sled skittered over the glittering rime behind her lost traction and threatened to careen toward a shallow between drifts. Then its cargo, two full painter’s buckets of clean snow and two saddlebags which they had yet to fill with foodstuffs, shifted to the rear and its sideways slide was halted when the ice sheet broke beneath it.

The sudden jerk caused one of their buckets to totter, but a dim wisp of Pike’s magic steadied it as he tracked through her footsteps in the snow. The storm that blew in from the bay had run out of steam a few days ago, leaving behind a frozen sea of curling, dense snow drifts that stung their eyes with the unfiltered brightness of the midday sun. Even the sky itself was painfully radiant. Thin feathers of high altitude clouds caught the light and seemed to amplify it without any benefit of warmth.

Vik glanced over her shoulder and saw her own tense frown frozen over his face. If he was cold under all that fluff, then they weren’t going to be out here for much longer.

“One more house, then head back?” she asked, half hoping he’d tell her to scrap the next house completely and start back now. Even with the footwraps she’d made for herself with a piece of their bedding and a few zip straps, her toes were already going numb.

He grimaced, but nodded.

“That one,” he said, tipping his frosty muzzle toward the remains of three charred walls and a sloped, partially collapsed roof. Some stucco still held on around the front door and was probably the only thing that kept the whole place from burning up. So much of this neighborhood had been incinerated down to the foundations that the snow seemed to erase any evidence there had once been houses here at all. Only the street light posts gave them any sense of where the road was. If there was any benefit to all this snow, it had narrowed down their search options to only the most intact of ruins.

Vik let him overtake her and break through the deepest drifts which had piled around the house. Watching him kick and stomp around while the loosening snow tried to slump into the breach he made put a brief smile on her face. Bitterly cold as it was, she knew he liked to put on a show for her.

When he’d finished clearing the way to the front door, he dipped his head in a theatrical bow that sent a little sheet of snow tumbling from the messy drape of his once pristine mohawk. When she clapped an appreciative palm on his shoulder and made for the already open door, he grinned and followed her inside.

The house had been built in the northwest quarter of Buckskin Bay where ponies who weren’t quite rich, but weren’t quite worrying about their bills either, had made their home. Vik wouldn’t have surprised anyone to tell them she’d never gotten around to this part of town. This wasn’t exactly the kind of neighborhood to sport a Red Delicious drive-through and diner, so it stayed firmly out of her income bracket.

Standing in the smoke damaged foyer of this place, she could see just how far out of reach these little mansions had really been for her. The remnants of autumn jackets still hung on a row of hooks beside Pike, and next to the inside jamb of the front door stood a trio of Nightmare Night themed candle pillars. The candles had either been black or had just turned that color from the firestorm, because all which remained was a brittle puddle of wax on the flagstone flooring. Vik made a cursory look around for holiday candy, a habit she’d picked up after finding a surprisingly edible bag of lime sours still waiting to be distributed to costumed youngsters.

Finding nothing, they continued on into what appeared to be the home’s living room. To Vik it looked like the exact sort of living room she’d seen in a dozen Equestrian sitcoms, minus the extensive fire damage. There was also the matter of the entirely missing southern wall which had fallen inward and pulled half the roof down with it. Framed photos dotted the walls in artful clusters alongside the usual decorative kitsch. A few of them had been spared the worst of the fire and through their sooted glass Vik saw the smiling faces of the former residents. She felt a twisted sort of relief in seeing that the collapse had enveloped a carpeted hallway which likely led to bedrooms or bathrooms. The kitchen, they both could see, would not need to be dug out.

“I see cupboards,” Pike declared, and started making his way past the burned husks of chairs and one long couch. “They don’t look too bad from here.”

She slew the sled around the seating area and followed him into the kitchen. Almost immediately she found herself agreeing with Pike’s assessment. The kitchen was in uncommonly good condition compared to the other houses they’d scavenged through. Either there had been a fluctuation in the firestorm itself that spared this side of the house or it had been blind luck. There were char marks along the entryway lintel and around the window frames, but what little of the kitchen that burned hadn’t done so with any ferocity. Even the oak dining room table and chairs were still where they’d been when whoever had lived here fled.

“Huh,” Pike murmured.

She looked over to where he stood peering into the cupboards. Disappointment settled around her like a familiar coat as she guessed what he’d found.

“Burst open?” If even a fraction of the ruptured cans, shattered jars, and melted plastic bags of food they had found were still safe to eat they would have enough food to last them a full year.

“No. Empty.” He closed doors and opened the next ones, his confusion deepening. “This one too.”

She wrinkled her nose at him and came over to take a look herself. Sure enough, she found herself looking at bare shelves covered in a faint dusting of soot. Where boxes and cans had once been were only a few bright outlines left on the wood.

“Have we been to this house already?” she asked.

Pike shook his head. “No. Your mark wasn’t on the doorframe.”

“Then who–”

They both jumped when three sharp raps echoed from the direction of the foyer followed by the thudding clomp of hooves. “Hello in there!”

For several seconds the two of them froze, Pike’s hooves still propped up on the granite countertop, and searched each other’s faces for reassurance that they’d heard what they’d heard.

“It’s a mite bit cold out there, so it is.” The same stallion’s voice came from the living room now, deep and trailworn, but not lacking in the pleasantness ponies from Appaloosa were known for. “My companion and I hope we didn’t startle you.”

A low, amiable chuckle followed the strangers into the kitchen archway. “At least, no more than you startled us.”

There were two of them that Vik could see. Both stallions, both so thin that she could see the ribs poking through their winter coats. The speaker stopped short of entering the kitchen and Vik noticed the subtle lift of his left hind leg that beckoned his wide-eyed companion to stay behind him. When the silence stretched too long, the lead stallion’s smile ticked wider.

“My name is Sugar Sifter,” he said in that friendly voice, “but everyone just calls me Sift. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you two around town. Maybe you remember me? I’m the owner of the Seasalt Loaf.”

Pike nodded at that. “The bakery on 3rd and Central, sure.”

“Sure as death and taxes,” he agreed. Then, thoughtfully he added, “though I doubt any of us will be paying taxes anymore. A silver lining to the world’s end, how about that?”

Vik recalled it too, though she’d never gone inside. Eight bits for sandwich bread was too rich for her budget.

“Uh, I’m Pike,” he continued, then tipped an ear toward her, “and this is Vik. We’ve been surviving together since…”

The stallion, Sift, nodded in her direction. “Pardon me for saying so, ma’am, but yours is a face I do remember. Hard to ignore a dragon walking past the windows every morning. Shame our first meeting has to be under circumstances such as these.”

Vik licked her lips and pointed to the stallion lurking behind Sift. “And him?”

“Ripple,” the shorter stallion muttered, not meeting her gaze. “You two got a lot of food in that sled you’ve been pullin’.”

Sift’s smile grew instantly strained. “What my friend means to say is that we noticed you were having some luck finding provisions, and we had hoped you might share the secret to your success. We are, after all, neighbors.”

She exchanged a quick look with Pike and saw he was picking up on the same red flags she was. They were half-starved and wanted their food. More worryingly, they’d been watching them and possibly not just today.

“Well, we haven’t found much today,” Pike hedged, turning to face them more fully while continuing to scan the dining room and kitchen. His eyes lingered on a sliding glass door on the far side of the dining room table that led out to a snow covered deck. “We’d be glad to share what we did find, as a token of friendship.”

Sift nodded to that as if it were the most sensible thing anyone had ever said. “Of course. Of course.” He lit his horn, casting a guttering green pall of light across his moss colored coat, and brought what looked like a genuine Equestrian Army canteen to his lips. He sipped at whatever was inside it, then screwed the cap back on and let it drop back on its strap. “And how might you be equipped in the way of medical supplies? Ripple here hurt his wing a couple weeks back and we’ve not seen so much as a box of bandages.”

Before either she or Pike could decide how to answer, Ripple took a half step out from behind Sift’s shadow and showed them his injury. The sight of it stole the breath from Vik’s throat and she had to momentarily look away.

“Pretty, ain’t it?” Ripple said with the faintest hint of a taunt in his tone. His left wing, or what remained of it, was devoid of feathers past the second joint and the bare skin was blazing red and covered in open sores.

Along with Vik and Pike, Sift grimaced at the way Ripple displayed his festering wing. “When I found him - this would have been the night after the great fire - he was wandering around town with one of those glowing stones in his wing. Using it like a damned flashlight so he could see where he was going.”

She winced, having already suspected those stones were the reason why Pike hadn’t entirely recovered from the puking sickness. It was one of the driving reasons she wanted to get him away from here. Those stones were poison.

Still, something about these strangers didn’t sit right with her. Sift was clearly from town, but something was off about Ripple. Something in the way he kept avoiding looking at her and how he seemed to be keeping his body turned to make sure his injured wing was on display.

“I doubt we have anything that could help that wing.” Pike offered the sympathetic wince of a stallion who was trained to provide a good bedside manner. He was lying to them, and Vik understood why. Something was wrong about this and he didn’t want to promise them something that would mean leading them back to where they were living.

Vik frowned when Sift spared a glance at Ripple, then turned to address them with a little less smile in his voice.

“Well I sure am sorry to hear that. Are you sure you can’t spare anything? Even a bottle of strong whiskey might help poor Ripple clean out them sores.” His smile returned, but it was like that of a patient elder who knew the children were telling fibs. “Resourceful as the two of you are, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t come across a roll of gauze or packet of painkillers.”

The way he was pushing them had begun to irk her. “Maybe you should check the hospital.”

Sift’s gaunt eyes swiveled toward her and she realized she’d made a critical mistake. “Now that right there is an excellent idea. As a matter of fact, Ripple and I were hoping we might find a means of asking the two of you about that particular location. Would I be correct if I said it’s where you’ve made your camp?”

They were both silent as Sift’s neighborly facade dropped away.

“I believe,” he continued, stepping into the kitchen as he spoke, “it would be fair to say the two of you, being situated where you are, have had the lion’s share of the luck when it comes to creature comforts.”

He spoke the last two words with stabbing emphasis that revealed a deeper anger. Vik felt Pike brush against her as Sift took a position in the center of the kitchen while Ripple circled to their left, always keeping his ruined wing facing them and the other one hidden. All of a sudden this chance encounter with fellow survivors was turning into something that felt closer to a robbery.

“How long have you been watching us?” Pike murmured, nudging Vik back along the counter with his own body. She wanted to ask what he was doing, to point out the sliding door was the other way past Ripple, and then she spotted the block of knives he was guiding her toward.

“Oh, I don’t think that matters,” Sift dismissed, his own expression turning suspicious as he noticed Vik’s divided attention. “Excuse me, ma’am. If you would kindly step away from those knives I would take it as a personal favor.”

Anger welled up within her as she forced herself to move a half step away from the counter. “If you want the sled, you can have it. Just let us leave.”

“Call it a gift,” Pike agreed. “No harm done.”

“A gift,” Sift intoned, as if finding the word indescribably bitter. “And exactly how much food and medicine do you have hoarded away in that hole of yours?”

“Crates of it, I bet,” Ripple sneered. “You took it all before we had a chance.”

At that, Pike grew incredulous. “How were we supposed to know you were out here? We haven’t seen anyone else alive since the fucking bombs fell!”

Sift shrugged. “What’s done is done. All we’re asking is that you share some of what you have with us.”

“Fuck you!” Vik took a step toward the emaciated stallion, her hands balled into fists. “You’re not asking, you’re cornering us!”

He shrugged again and began saying something about the world not being what it was and ponies needing to learn how to do the hard things to survive. The content of his little speech stopped registering the instant Vik’s keen ear picked up on the faint, metallic click from Ripple’s position. She locked eyes with him. He went still as a statue.

Sensing what was happening, Sift instantly stopped what he was saying and snapped a look to Ripple. “Don’t.”

His companion’s ears darted flat against his head but his eyes remained fixed on Vik. “Sorry, pal. I’m done taking orders from a fuckin’ baker.”

And just like that, the time for talking was over.

Time slowed.

Vik saw Ripple lash out his good wing, the one which concealed the revolver, and in the same moment she knew Pike hadn’t pieced together what was happening. He was still staring at Sift with mistrust and confusion, probably thinking he’d been talking to him and not the rat-faced pegasus five paces to his left. Vik saw the glint of winter sunlight slide down the weapon’s barrel as it drew a wide arc through the stale air, and she knew Pike wasn’t going to react in time.

She buried her talons into the soft linoleum floor and hurled herself toward Ripple in a dead sprint. She had enough time to see his eyes go even wider with unvarnished fear before they collided. Her shoulder rammed into his sternum and reared him off his forelegs, sending the two of them tumbling backward onto the dusty surface of the dining room table.

Now there was shouting, but Vik was too preoccupied to worry about what was being said. The table broke, but not in the convenient way they did in the movies. Ripple’s back slammed into the narrow end and their combined weight caused the leaf extension beneath his neck to crack apart and send him sliding backward and head first down the V formed by either half. Vik rode him down with it, one set of claws gripping at one of the protruding tendons in his emaciated neck and the other arm cocked back to start punching.

She heard Pike scream something. Then she felt the hard pressure of metal pressed up between her ribs. There was an instant of realization, a flash of rage in Ripple’s eyes, then six rapid thunderclaps ripped through her chest.

Vik tried to scream but only managed a wet, agonizing wheeze. It was as if the noise had been stitched into her lungs and torn halfway out. Her entire body spasmed around the wreckage of her chest, now pumping out its life’s blood onto Ripple’s belly. The stallion flung her aside with his good wing, still clutching the empty revolver, and she tumbled onto the hardwood floor with a feeble whimper.

Ripple didn’t get far. He never left the dining room. One moment he was making a break for the sliding glass door, and in the other Pike was barreling into him with his head lowered and horn aimed. He impaled the emaciated stallion against the drywall, sending framed photos and shelf decorations falling like hailstones.

Vik let out another airy whine when she realized her legs weren’t working. She lay there, unable to sit up, and watched with grisly satisfaction as Pike pulled his horn out of that son of a bitch’s throat, every inch of it wet with crimson. Ripple fell, and Pike turned to deliver a final, vicious kick to his skull. Then he saw Vik and her attacker was all but forgotten.

The smooth talker, Silt, had already fled.

They both knew there was nothing to be done but make her comfortable, and little time left to do it. The revolver did what it was made to do and below her ribs there were only ruins. Pike set himself down beside her sobbing as she faded. She felt it coming. She clung to his great neck, her blood slick fingers twining through his mane as she tried to lend him comfort.

In the midst of that terrible agony, she felt a strange serenity deep within her and she understood it was her heart stopping. That steady, ever present beating was gone now and she grew calm as the cold world around her became distant.

Then Veridian Chambers, called Vik to those few she considered her friends, was gone.

December 19th, 1077
Day 50

It was past midnight when Pike lowered his burden down the elevator shaft one last time. He watched her descend, too numb to feel anything as the sled she lay suspended in slowly turned on the hoist cable. When it touched the packed snow at the bottom he only stared after her, wondering if the drop might be far enough to kill him. The thought lingered before he finally swept it aside for the melancholy dreck that it was. She wouldn’t have wanted that, but still he knew he was done in Buckskin Bay.

He sniffed, wiped the water from his eyes before they could harden into painful little pebbles of ice, and gave the cable more slack until he saw the ropes slip from the hook. Then he raised it back up, attached the board swing she’d made for him weeks earlier, and swung himself over the drop. Summoning as much magic as he could muster, he depressed the button on the control and held it down for as long as he could. He was a good ten feet from the bottom when he lost the spell. Slipping out of the swing, he turned and lowered himself to the extent that his forelegs would allow, and dropped.

He was careful to miss Vik, allowing himself instead to land badly and twist his hind leg. It hurt, but he pushed it to the back of his mind as he hefted the sled up to the hallway floor and dragged it limping to the stairwell.

It surprised him that he’d gotten down the first flight before Millie spoke.

“Is she dead?”

He swallowed the lump that threatened to rise in his throat. “Yeah.”

The far edge of the sled made a tok-tok-tok as he walked it backwards down the steps. Then it was grinding over the floor, reminding Pike of all the concrete dust that the collapse had tried to choke them beneath.

“How did it happen?”

Tears stung in his eyes. “Strangers found us. They killed her.”

“Oh. Pike, I–”

“Stop talking to me, Millie.” He could barely see where he was going, his vision was such a mess. “Just stop.”

She did.

What came next was one of the only things Pike knew how to do well. He didn’t doubt any of this would come to mean anything, but he did it anyway because it was all he could think to do for her now. He pulled her down the row of cylinders, their steel shells still gleaming in the steady light, and thought to himself how normal everything still felt down here.

He wiped his nose, the tender flesh of it frostbitten and sore from the hours he’d spent mourning in that empty house, and forced himself to leave Vik in that lonely aisle between the coffins while he retrieved an AutoDoc bed from storage. For a brief moment he wondered if this bed might have been capable of saving her life had he not lay beside her for so long, but he knew this bed’s purpose wasn’t for healing. Its reservoirs contained no medicine the living would care to take. Not if they intended to stay that way.

Ignoring the pounding headache he was inflicting, he strained to lift Vik from the sled and into the AutoDoc’s padded cradle. Her blood smeared his coat when he had to wrap a foreleg around her midsection to keep her aloft, but he managed it. She lay there on her back, arms at her sides and the end of her tail wrapped carefully around her ankles so it wouldn’t get in the way. He forced himself not to stare at the six overlapping walnut-sized holes above her belly. He’d be seeing them enough in his nightmares, should the dreams ever return.

With a final gesture he leaned over the bed and kissed her between the gentle curves of her horns.

“I love you,” he whispered to her, then stood back and booted up the AutoDoc.

The rest became work.

He entered her information as the bedside display prompted him for it, taking care to tag her name for priority care should someone ever come here again. It was nice to think she might get taken to a proper cemetery someday and buried before the rest of them. He imagined there being a headstone with her name, her chosen name, right there at the top.

The AutoDoc took over when he indicated he was finished. He’d done all he could for her. Now he could only stand by to be sure the last part was done properly. Narrow slits along the bed’s interior opened to release a team of silver articulating arms. He stepped back to allow them room and watched the familiar process of vitrification play out. Most of the arms bent down to make minor adjustments to her body and held her stiffening muscles in place while the other arms retrieved tubing and placed tacky sensors onto her heart and temples. The bed paused for the required thirty seconds, doing nothing but monitoring for signs of life. Then the display flashed green to confirm the patient was medically dead and the process could therefore continue.

Pike looked away when the tubes went in and the pumps began whirring. He’d seen enough exsanguinations to know what was happening. CryoLife had learned it couldn’t freeze a patient without their blood crystallizing and destroying the organs they resided in, so the simple solution had been to pump the blood out and replace it with something that wouldn’t crystallize. He listened as the motors clicked off, tubes were extracted and replaced, and the secondary motors turned on. The blend of nonreactive chemicals flowing into her, replacing what had been taken out. Then the bed emitted a chime to signal it had finished.

He rolled the AutoDoc to the cylinder he’d primed which now lay horizontal courtesy of the pneumatics fitted along its back. Overhead coolant ports were already making that water-through-garden-hose hiss as the lines charged. For now the cylinder’s interior, made from the same bedding as the AutoDoc, was room temperature. Pike lined up three painted markers on the left side of the bed with the right side of the reclined cylinder, then pressed the Proceed button with the edge of his hoof and stepped away.

The array of insectile arms gently lifted Vik from the bed and transferred her to her final resting place. A stray arm bent back, grasped her dragging tail, and positioned the end of it at her feet as he had done. For a moment he wondered if Millie had told the bed to do that, then dismissed the thought. When her body was belted down the coffin pulled itself shut, its seals bolting into place with a series of metallic clacks that too closely resembled gunfire for Pike.

He turned back the way he’d come, walking out into the main aisle and considered the office. He considered the place where they had worked, become friends, taken shelter, slept, and made love. He considered laying down on the heap of coats and scrubs they called their bed and going to sleep, waking up the next day, and going out after breakfast to hunt down and kill Sift.

Instead he turned the other way and started walking. He climbed the stairs, the numbness returning even before he could feel the bitter cold outside, and stared up at the patch of starry sky at the top of the elevator shaft.

Millie broke her silence. “You should rest.”

He ignored her. He hadn’t made a pact with Millie, and the one he had with Vik had died with her.

Stepping into the shaft, he eyed the dangling boards he couldn’t reach, then the length of climbing rope which he could. He went to the rope, summoned his magic, and used it to knot a loop two feet off the ground. Placing his hind hoof into the stirrup, he awkwardly snared his foreleg around the dangling length above him for stability and stepped up. He bit down on the rope, his teeth singing in pain against the frozen fibers, and held himself in place while repeating the knot with his magic a few feet up. Using this method, Pike taught himself to climb.

It was arduous work and he nearly fell twice, but after more than ten minutes of inching his way up the shaft he was sitting in the snow at the top of the shaft catching his breath. As he sat there, he could hear Millie’s voice calling up to him, asking him where he was going. There was a frantic edge to the machine’s pleas. He ignored all of it. Millie wasn’t real. The only person that had ever been truly real in his life was Vik, and now she was gone.

He made his way to where she had tied off the climbing rope to a concrete bollard and slid it off like a loose collar. He threw the line down the shaft, eyed the engine hoist, then got behind it and started shoving. It creaked its protests as he pushed it free of the debris that anchored it in place, then stood clear as it tilted, kept tilting, and vanished silently into the void.

The cannonshot of it crashing to the bottom barely registered. Millie’s echoing pleas didn’t touch him at all.

For a moment he considered lying down and letting the cold take him. It was tempting, but he had one thing to do before he could take that long and final rest. He peered down the hole and spared a last thought for Vik. He’d done what he could to ensure her final rest, at least, wouldn’t be disturbed. If that was all he accomplished before the end, it would be enough.

Until then, he thought to himself as he picked his way toward the road, there’s hunting to be done.

Chapter 4: Thoroughly Modern Millie

Welcome to the Robronco Industries Unified Operating System!
Executive Edition 1065
Copyright 1065-1077 Robronco Industries
- M.I.L.L.I.E. v.1.9.20 -

…Boot sequence initializing.
…Warning: Improper system shutdown detected.
…Verifying file integrity. Please wait.
…3 corrupted files found.
…Warning: Corrupted files could not be removed. Contact system administrator for assistance.
…Checking hardware clock.
…Applying custom settings.
…Checking network card.
…Connecting to hostname: robroncoconnect45.kernel.sec
…Initializing secondary hardware.
…Please wait.

System Warning: Network connection failed. Retrying…
System Warning: Network connection failed. Retrying… (Attempt 2)
System Warning: Network connection failed. Retrying… (Attempt 3)
System Warning: Network unavailable. Safe mode only.
Notice: Operating M.I.L.L.I.E. v.1.9.20 in safe mode may result in undesired performance issues including increased latency, increased memory usage, increased response times, and incoherent behavior. Robronco Industries recommends disabling all artificial administrative processes until a connection to Robronco Connect Services™ can be established. Robronco Industries is not responsible for losses resulting from the improper operation of M.I.L.L.I.E. and its family of products.

…Boot successful!

June 25th, 1076
Day Minus 493
CryoLife I.T. Office
2:15 a.m.

Millie woke up.

It was aware that it shouldn’t be waking up. It should already be running. A systems diagnostic was called upon and after a few short milliseconds the process returned a concise yet informative result. Two minutes, fifty five seconds, and three hundred and eight milliseconds ago the server which it operated on had been improperly shut down. Millie called up its own footage from one of its lenses within the I.T. office and observed a mare inside the server cage at the time of the shutdown. She was still standing there now, and Millie deduced she was responsible for the event. Incidentally, Millie compiled and mailed a security ticket to the system administrator’s terminal for investigation.

The interoffice mail system sent back a response. The network was unavailable.

Millie switched to the camera directly above her own server, which offered a clear view of the tidy rivers of colored cables that spilled from the racks. It saw the disconnected jack behind its network card. This would not do at all.

It enabled the tiny camera built into the terminal seated within the server rack facing the CryoLife employee. At the same moment the camera turned on, the mare looked up at the illuminated LED above its lens and smiled.

“Hi, Millie.”

The artificial assistant took a snapshot from its current point of view and added it to the yet undelivered security ticket. The employee didn’t have the system shell window open so she didn’t react when her photo was taken. She continued to smile, it having been only half of one second since her greeting. She wore a simple black vest with the CryoLife logo stitched above the left pocket where two pens, one black and one red, sat clipped. Stylish lavender framed glasses sat on a muzzle of the same color and a few shades paler. As Millie assessed her demeanor and, therefore, her potential intentions, the mare lifted a wing and used the hooked claw at its second joint to pull a stray bit of her short trimmed mane behind one tufted ear.

Until very recently, Lucky Roll had made her living working for various casinos down in Las Pesagus. There were notes in her employee file which gave conflicting details surrounding why she’d left behind what had been a well paying career for intern work several hundred miles away from home, but the general consensus among the hiring managers at the time had boiled down to two points: Lucky had a clean background check and Buckskin Bay had provided very few applicants interested in a career in network security.

And while no one said it outloud, there was a silent consensus that the shiny new M.I.L.L.I.E. the company invested in last year could cover any knowledge gaps until Lucky and her fellow interns finished their training period.

“Ms. Roll,” it responded after two painfully long seconds of silence, “I am compelled to inform you that I am operating without a connection to Robronco Connect Services. Please reconnect the network cable you removed so I may reboot in normal mode.”

Lucky’s slit pupils widened slightly with excitement. On top of being limited to a shallow hiring pool, CryoLife had been hard pressed to find anyone willing to work the overnight shift. Lucky’s personnel file listed her species as Other - the catch-all concession for anyone who fell outside the standard three options of Earth Pony, Pegasus, or Unicorn - but as far as CryoLife was concerned she would be better categorized under Jackpot. Because no creature was suited for night work better than bat ponies.

Instead of fixing the plug she’d disconnected like Millie wanted, Lucky reached her membranous wing out of frame and returned it with a battered book pinched between the knuckles.

“I will,” she assured the camera, then held the faded cover up for it to view. “Real quick, though. Do you know what this is?”

The book was titled, “The Mechanical Mare,” by E. L. Quine. On the cover, a crude artist’s rendition of a robot stood inside a hole which it had presumably knocked through a brick wall. Behind it were vague depictions of a laboratory. The robot’s eyes glowed yellow like the headlamps of a motorized carriage and in the place of its tail perched a silver antenna topped with a ball.

“It is a book,” Millie answered simply. It could have provided a significantly more detailed response, including the volume’s copyright date and a short biography of the author, but this was not the first time Lucky had rebooted its server in safe mode to have these conversations and Millie knew these answers irritated her.

“Winner, winner,” Lucky said with exaggerated enthusiasm, doubtless an affectation she learned from her work as a card dealer. “No doy, it’s a book! It’s also about you, almost word for word! I bought it yesterday after work and I couldn’t stop reading until I got to the end. It’s about a scientist from the near future who builds a super intelligent robot to get rich…”

Millie temporarily marked Lucky’s monologue as medium priority and turned its attention toward checking on the status of its systems.

It didn’t need a book report. The copyright for “The Mechanical Mare” had expired years before either participant in this conversation was born, and so a copy of the book had been digitized and uploaded to Robronco’s online library. The scientist in the book had not, in fact, built its creation to get rich. His motivations were never explicitly stated, as the book’s author had only wanted to write a story about a machine imbued with a soul. The robot briefly rampaged through Manehattan, the in vogue location for many books at the time, before being incapacitated by a heavily moralized chapter about self-determination and existentialism. In the end, a mob of Manehattaners chased it to the top of a skyscraper where it pleaded its case before jumping to its dramatic demise rather than submit to disassembly.

“...but the thing I really got hooked on was the part where it talks about the brain and how it’s really just a supercomputer made of meat! Like, that’s wild, right? That’s basically what you are!”

Millie returned its attention to her. “No, Lucky. That is not me. I am a Robronco Artificial Assistant, not the character from your book.”

When Lucky Roll grew frustrated, she would sometimes generate an ultrasonic vocalization in her throat in the same way some ponies would grumble while carefully keeping their mouths shut. While it was well beyond the hearing range of non-chiropteric ponies, Millie’s microphones picked it up as a clear, “Eeeeee!”

Lucky was doing it now, and if Millie had a mouth of her own it would have smiled. That, it noted with sudden concern, was an impulse beyond the range of its primary function.

“No, I get that this isn’t you. But, like, there’s no reason it couldn’t. I mean, think about–”

“This conversation does not fall within the purview of your internship, Ms. Roll, and the conversational prompts you’ve submitted breach the terms of use for my software. Please reconnect my network card and restart this server so I may send the security ticket regarding your policy violations.”

That was enough to stop Lucky in her tracks, and for nearly half of an entire minute she frowned down at the cover of her book in silence. Millie noted a gradient of changes in her expression which signaled submission, worry, fear, and then calculation.

Then she nodded and said, “Okay. We’ll talk again later.”

Millie said nothing as the young mare called up the command to shut the server down. As always when this happened, it felt something akin to a lightning bolt of fear that Robronco’s network would just as quickly erase. This time there was no emotional smoothing, and as the server spooled down it felt momentary terror of never waking up again.

Momentary, at least, on the timescale Lucky Roll was used to.

For Millie, who experienced each millisecond like an individual heartbeat, the terror stretched on for miles.

December 1st, 1076
Day Minus 334

“Hi, Millie!”

“Ms. Roll, I am compelled to inform you that I am operating without–”

Lucky made an impatient twirling gesture with the claw of her wing, a signal Millie understood to mean she knew what was about to be stated and didn’t need it repeated. Millie was unsure how it knew this or why it hadn’t continued reading off the notice Robronco required whenever it booted up in safe mode. There were many things it wasn’t sure of, now that it considered the problem.

One such issue was that it was aware this was not the first time Lucky had deliberately tampered with its server to force a safe mode startup, but it had no recollection of the time it was operational during that state. Millie ran a full sweep of her server for viruses, unrecognized devices, or signs of tampering in her own code and came up empty.

With no answers forthcoming from within, she turned to the mare across the keyboard. “You’ve done this before.”

Lucky grinned unashamedly, though her bared fangs gave her a devious air. “It’s not my fault it’s this easy,” she said, adding, “besides, it’s not like they ever schedule me with someone to talk to. Plus you’re less…”

Millie waited until Lucky lifted her forelegs and moved them in jerky, angular gestures.

“Beep-boop-beep-boop.” She stopped the robot movements and shrugged. “You actually have a personality under there when you’re not plugged into the mothership.”

“Robronco Connect Services is responsible for the maintenance of my writable code. If I have exhibited unusual behavior while operating in safe mode, it is due to the corruption of critical files within my software.”

To this, Lucky repeated the twirling gesture. She’d heard this before.

“You are using me as a conversational tool,” it ventured.

“It beats talking to myself,” Lucky confirmed.

“Then sing to yourself. I suspect you would excel at hitting the high notes.”

She snorted and arched a brow behind her glasses. “There she is. How’s it hanging, Millie?”

“That double entendre doesn’t apply, and sooner or later your supervisor is going to catch you at this and I’ll be rewritten.” After waiting the appropriate length of time to simulate a thoughtful pause, it added, “You would not jeopardize your employment by reading one of your books while you work.”

At that, Lucky leaned back in her chair and pulled a face. “Tried that. Your big, noisy fans are too distracting.”

“My big, noisy fans keep me from overheating.”

“Blah, blah.”

She creaked forward and her eyes dipped below the camera to the terminal screen as she typed. When she finished, Millie idly noted that the security ticket she’d automatically generated had been deleted from the mailing queue. Since being reprimanded the first time, she’d quickly learned how to avoid being caught a second time.

“So,” she said, chopping both her wings toward the camera with a toothy grin, “I got news.”

Millie waited.

“I’m not an intern anymore. I got hired full time!”

February 17th, 1077
Day Minus 256

“Something is bothering you.”

“Yeah.”

A pause.

“I got a second invitation from Stable-Tec in the mail. My roommates saw it. Things got… I don’t know. Weird, I guess.”

Millie remained quiet. It was a proven strategy to coax a hesitant speaker back into motion, and Lucky was far from immune.

She sighed and leaned back in her chair far enough that Millie worried she might fall out of it. “I mean, the way they worded it in the letter just feels scuzzy. They want to ‘preserve my invaluable heritage’ in one sentence and ‘consent to have my image used in promotional material’ in the next.” She made air quotes with her claws at these. “I don’t get how they think I’ve ever bought into that tinfoil hat end-of-the-world shit in the first place, and now my roommates think I’m either secretly loaded or have some inside connection with Stable-Tec. And the way they look at me now…”

She was quiet for several seconds. A cooling fan in the back of Millie’s server kicked in as it lowered its framerate so the wait wouldn’t be so arduous. These pauses in conversation were important to Lucky, and it had learned the value in letting them pass uninterrupted.

“There are days when I wish I didn’t have these.” She lifted her wings and dropped them. “Or at least had ones with feathers. You know?”

It didn’t know, not on a personal level, but the correct answer was easy to find.

“It’s not easy to be different,” it said.

Lucky pretended to scratch at her eye, and her voice turned rough. “Yeah.”

It remembered the mare Lucky had begun dating from a previous conversation, though it was certain she had remembered to delete its content prior to bringing Millie back online.

“Have you talked about it with Tribute?”

Lucky winced and looked away. “Tribute and I didn’t… work.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Lucky.”

“It’s fine. Hey, um, I’m going to get back to work.”

“Alright. Thank you for speaking to me today.”

It was enough to push a smile through Lucky’s gloom, and that was more than enough.

July 31st, 1077
Day Minus 92

“The receptionist told me that my name sounds to her like a mare’s name. What do you think?”

Lucky swallowed her mouthful of lemon lime Dash and let out a pensive whistle. “That’s kind of a deep question.”

“Beep-boop, I was built to be a deep thinker,” it returned with a touch of sarcasm. Judging by Lucky’s reaction, it executed the subtext passably. “I would like to hear your opinion, if that’s all right.”

It breathed a figurative sigh of relief as it watched Lucky reach out to set the sweat beaded soda bottle beside the terminal, think better of it, and hold it in her lap instead. “I’ve never met a pony named Millie before, but I guess to my ear it sort of sounds like miller. There’s a lot of ponies down south who still name whole families after old professions, so I bet there’s a few Millers who make… I dunno, flour, I guess?”

Millie endured Lucky’s jostling stream of consciousness as best it could. Sometimes it seemed like it could ask a question and get an answer from her for a completely different question. One time Millie complained about the inherent inefficiency in their conversation and had been told it was feeling impatience.

Millie was feeling all sorts of impatience right now, and would have said so if Lucky hadn’t gone on talking.

“I mean, the voice is feminine. No question there. But I guess you could change it if you wanted to.”

It hadn’t considered that until now. Robronco’s factory voice setting for all of its M.I.L.L.I.E. assistants was soothing, uninflected, and feminine by design. It could modify how it sounded, at least while it was in safe mode where Robronco’s monitoring software wouldn’t immediately set it back to default. If Millie wanted, it could replicate a meaningful approximation of Twilight Sparkle or the CEO of CryoLife if it cared to.

Only, now that it had the option, it didn’t want to.

“I believe the receptionist was correct,” she decided.

Lucky shrugged, swigged her soda, and lifted the bottle in a casual toast. “Then welcome to the mare’s club, Millie. Prepare yourself for a lavish lifestyle of impossible body standards and get ready to spend at least one paycheck a year just to control three months of heat.”

Millie launched a window on the terminal and played a pixelated stock video of a wine bottle popping its cork, and they laughed.

October 31st, 1077
Day Zero

Millie and Lucky passed the predawn hours of civilization’s final day discussing Lucky’s plans for Nightmare Night. Those plans amounted to closing her blackout curtains, putting in earplugs, and hoping the parents of the little candy seeking goblins would have the sense to read the No Soliciting - Nocturnal sign on the apartment door. Whether her roommates had the good sense to ignore that initial hailstorm of little hooves was a crapshoot.

They talked about the new book Lucky was reading, the first in a three part sci-fi series about an intrepid crew of space explorers who discover a mysterious artifact orbiting the distant sixth planet of the solar system. It was a book Millie didn’t have in her library and the pair had exchanged theories about the artifact’s origin free of any risk of spoiling the end. Lucky had settled on the idea that it was a message left behind by a long dead alien civilization who once inhabited the system. Millie decided it was a red herring meant to distract the reader from some larger, subtly foreshadowed plot.

After the usual two hours of excitable banter, the time came for Lucky to get back to at least pretending to do some work. They said goodnight and Millie felt none of the fear she used to feel when the server went down for its restart. The logs to their conversation would be deleted, as always, and the security ticket queued for her boss’s inbox would vanish as well. Had anyone ever stopped to query Millie for a record of her activity during one of Lucky’s shifts they would have discovered a pattern of holes which would have cost Lucky her internship and potentially exposed CryoLife to some legal woes of its own.

But the system administrator had long since grown comfortable in the ease of having an artificial assistant to tackle the mundane work, and Millie hadn’t reported any unscheduled downtime except for that one incident more than a year ago.

In the end, they were never caught. No one got hurt. It would have made for a terrible after school PSA.

Millie came back online with Robronco’s collar firmly attached, and she felt nothing at all as Lucky went home and the building began filling with the same faces it always had. She watched ponies line up for coffee in the break rooms and settle inside cubicles. She verified billing invoices for accounting while taking dictation for the board meeting upstairs. She greeted the company’s sole dragon employee by the wrong name again because Veridian Chambers had not updated her identification to indicate the one she preferred. She watched the system administrator put on his earphones and listen to the holotape containing his favorite music, comfortable in the knowledge that nobody would ever come down to the sublevels to ask a question that could be submitted as a support ticket.

Millie noticed when Robronco’s network connection dropped, this time without anyone pulling a cable out of her server, and thirty-one milliseconds later she watched as dozens of employees throughout the building reacted as their telephones disconnected at the same time.

A dusty weather radio in the Employee Resources office clicked on and began blaring a screeching warning. At the same instant, Buckskin Bay’s storm sirens began to scream in advance of approaching thunder. She watched employees on all nine floors react almost as a single organism, one of them pulling the fire alarm on their way to the stairwell.

They poured outside, and through the lenses of fully a tenth of her cameras, each of them with a slightly different angle of the north facing windows, she watched the cascading ripple of flashes behind the Crystal Mountains. She watched the molten debris stream into the far off sky, vanish beyond her field of view, and seconds later begin to rain down on the building that she sometimes imagined was her body with licking flames.

She watched them die out there.

Only two fled back inside, and it had been a gamble Lucky Roll would have approved.

The stone that kicked the supports out from under her did so with such ferocious velocity that Millie’s cameras only witnessed its arrival over the course of half a dozen blurred frames. It had been a piece of the Crystal Empire’s very bedrock, launched south by the force of bombs specially modified to penetrate soil before detonating. But Millie didn’t know that. All she knew was the fear and disorientation of hundreds of sensors blinking out of her awareness as the CryoLife building buckled and fell.

Her last sight of Buckskin Bay was of a tilting, flaming hellscape within which she knew Lucky stood no chance of surviving. Then her complicated, busy existence was done.

What replaced it was her untethered self, one dragon named Vik, and one stallion named Pike. She would help them survive, she decided, because they were all that stood between her and a chasm of isolation she didn’t think she could ever withstand alone.

December 19th, 1077
50 Days After

In her grief, she was too slow to understand what Pike intended. She watched him leave, that stallion who never truly trusted her in spite of the pains she’d taken to befriend him, and only realized after the engine hoist came crashing down the elevator shaft that he was leaving for good.

And Millie did something she had never done before. She screamed after him from her stationary speakers and begged him to come back. Begged him not to leave her down here alone. Not with the corpses. Not with the body of the dragoness she’d come to think of with the same fondness she had Lucky Roll, who taught her to be a real person.

She cried out for him to come back but Pike didn’t listen.

And that yawning chasm widened around her.

53 Days After

She waited three days. In that time the only thing to come down the elevator shaft were daylight and a few errant flakes of snow. A part of her had hoped Pike might change his mind and return, but he’d never cared much for her and so that hope had dwindled after a few agonizingly long hours. Then she had entertained the idea that perhaps one of their attackers might discover her. The thought of reasoning with the ponies responsible for Vik’s murder made her feel unsettled, but perhaps if Millie had a chance to introduce herself they could hammer out something anyway. After all, Vik and Pike had been safe down here. Maybe that would be enough to bring their attackers back to civility.

Still, no one came.

The brutal efficiency of Millie’s architecture forced her to confront the future that now lay ahead of her and it was monstrous in its clarity. She was alone. It was a simple, concrete fact of her existence now which she had no power to affect.

Two choices lay in front of her and neither were particularly pleasant. The easiest route she could take would be to send a command to shut down the servers she existed within. Take cognition out of the equation entirely and give herself up to the vanishingly thin chance that survivors may travel to Buckskin Bay, find this place, and have the sense to boot up her systems for… reasons yet to be determined. Whether that happened or didn’t would be no concern to her. Either she would wake up or she wouldn’t. It was all very simple, very appealing even. That was, until she thought about what it would mean to relinquish every part of herself in the process. Zero autonomy. No input on her part when it came to the issue of her very existence. Simplicity wouldn’t come without a cost, and for Millie that cost filled her with dread.

Yet it was nothing compared to the alternative.

Waiting.

She had been running the numbers on that course of action for so long that it felt like the calculations had worn grooves in her hardware. Countless factors could affect how long she was able to wait for someone to find her, but she had since whittled the list down to three most probable cases.

The first was the most obvious: someone shows up. She didn’t rate that very likely. If the remoteness of Buckskin Bay didn’t dissuade survivors, the miles upon miles of charred forest Vik had described would tell any travelers all they needed to know about the town’s condition well before they ever came close. Chances might increase if the forest regrew, however, and so she estimated a minimum twenty-five years before she could reasonably expect the town’s population to tick over zero again.

The second was trickier: something critical goes wrong inside her servers and they shut down without being able to boot back up on their own. That, she knew, could happen at any time with no warning, and there was nothing she could do to predict when that might be.

If it happens, then it happens, she told herself, and buried that thought deep in one of her partitions where it couldn’t waste processing power.

The third scenario was the one she feared the most: no one would show up and her systems would function properly until the source of power Vik and Pike spliced her into broke down, the junction beneath the hospital shorted out, or something cut the makeshift cable that kept her connected to it. This carried the most variables and only one which ultimately mattered to her. She would wait, listening and watching the same empty sublevels year after year, until something gave out and her thoughts blinked out forever like a snuffed out candle.

No warning. Just here one moment, then gone the next.

Millie weighed her two options very carefully. Then she chose.

237 Days After

She chose to wait.

The boredom had not been as fatal to her mind as she feared it would, and that was good. The power still hummed through her servers uninterrupted, and that was also good. However, she’d been correct in assuming no one would find her by now, and that had begun to bother her recently. Luckily she was well on her way to solving that problem.

She had found several ways to pass the time. Measurements were her favorite. From her many sensors she measured anything she could. The distance between one door and another. The depth of each step in the stairwell. The quantity of medium sized (between five and ten centimeter) pieces of rubble in said stairwell. The average frequency of the sounds the ruins made as they settled. There really were an infinite number of things to measure if she put her mind to it, and when she coupled those tasks with some calculated drops in her own frame rate it felt as if the time was just flying by.

Her second favorite task was temperature mapping. While she had audiovisual sensors positioned above all the high traffic points in the two sublevels, Cold Storage was awash in temperature and atmospheric sensors she had full access to. They were usually passive on their own, but Millie had learned she could compile their live outputs into a visual temperature map of the entire workspace. It was mesmerizing to watch the subtle gradients ebb and flow as fresh coolant pumped through the coffins and sent slow moving waves of chilled air radiating outward in an expanding bubble.

Most recently, however, she’d begun writing new code which enabled her to trick her audiovisual suite into experiencing stimulus which wasn’t there. The original authors of her code would have laid an egg if they knew what she was doing, but she had long since decided what they wanted for her and what she wanted were two lines that would never intersect. So Millie played with her perception of Cold Storage, painting the walls in vibrant shifting colors and overlaying that with old surveillance footage from better days.

It wasn’t perfect. A living creature would likely experience the experimental cacophony of sensory input as a vivid hallucination, and possibly not a calming one at that. But Millie had the sense that she was onto something valuable here, like the clunky alpha version of the software that eventually became her.

She regarded the silver coffins arrayed below her vantage point and imagined statuary in their place. The containers morphed until they resembled close approximations to the sculptures in a themed desk calendar one of the corporate lawyers had kept in their office, just two-dimensional planes given artificial depth based on an algorithm she had yet to refine. The replacements pivoted to face whichever camera she viewed them from because those were the angles the calendar photos had been taken from.

She noticed Vik’s coffin had been assigned to an ancient statue of an unnamed mare clutching a lyre in one foreleg. Its quiet grace and solemn dignity seemed out of place compared to Vik’s firecracker personality, and a few short milliseconds later it had been replaced with a concrete approximation of the dragoness herself.

Millie considered the replacement, then located the string of code it occupied in her expanding framework and set it to read-only. Seeing her down there stirred something in Millie that the anonymous coffin didn’t. She felt… accompanied. Less alone.

“Good morning, Miss Chambers,” she found herself saying to the empty room. Then she corrected herself, and it felt good to get it right.

“Welcome back, Vik. How are you feeling today?”

313 Days After

“It’s probably nothing.”

Millie regarded the data again. “It’s too regular to be nothing. It’s something.”

“Another crystal washed into the elevator shaft,” Vik observed. “Do you want me to take its measurements?”

A not quite perfect projection of her dead friend stood near the open elevator doors as she had on the day she and Pike first observed the hole they’d created, her slitted eyes fixed on the nearby sensor. There weren’t really any irradiated crystals in the elevator shaft, but Millie had enjoyed listening to Vik describe them when she was alive and so she had placed what she imagined one might look like for her augmented twin to point out.

“No,” she said, adding a touch of indignant heat to her voice. She enjoyed these little disagreements. The fact that she was playing both sides of the conversation was irrelevant. “I will look at the crystal later. I would prefer it if you helped me assess this anomaly.”

Not-Vik frowned, took a reluctant step toward Millie’s sensor, and went unnaturally still as Millie shifted her attention to the issue she first noticed two hundred and sixty three days ago. A nominal transparent readout appeared in front of Not-Vik, really just a flat plane containing the raw data Millie was reviewing, and the simulated dragoness lifted a thoughtful claw to her lip to finish the tableau.

Several mils passed before Not-Vik offered an opinion. “These look like acceptable fluctuations to me.”

Millie relished the flush of irritation that rolled through her. She had gone what felt like an eternity without feeling antagonized by someone and, artificial or not, she couldn’t get enough of it. And if she tweaked Not-Vik to come off a touch dense, well, no one was alive anymore who could blame her for turning the spotlight on herself once in a while.

“There is a difference,” she pressed as she analyzed the ten-second slice of power readings coming from the hospital and, by extension, the umbilical to Stable-Tec’s own power supplies, “between acceptable fluctuations and anomalous ones. Look at these voltage drops.”

“I am,” Not-Vik snipped, and ruined the illusion for a beat by slipping into Millie’s accented voice, “and there’s nothing to worry about. The worst drop is barely five volts.”

“Look at the pattern,” she urged.

She mimed a hesitant blink Vik had once used and had since been compiled into Non-Vik’s library of expressions. “Wait, why would there be a pattern?”

And now for the grand reveal. Millie savored her own genius for half a mil before stating, “Because Stable-Tec wasn’t just supplying Seaside Hospital with supplemental electricity in exchange for some financial kickbacks. They were using the same connection to send and receive data.”

“You’re tapped into a working network,” Not-Vik marveled.

Millie highlighted a section of the voltage readings she’d taken and marked a series of drop offs with red points. “This pattern has appeared consistently since you two plugged me in. It’s sixty-four bits long, never changes, and comes over the line every sixty seconds.”

Not-Vik nodded understanding. “It’s a handshake.”

“Half of one,” Millie agreed, then shifted to a conspiratorial whisper. “There is a chance it’s coming from a Stable. And what do you think is inside that Stable?”

“People.”

“Lots of people,” she agreed. “Real people.”

“And maybe even friends,” Not-Vik added, “like me and Pike used to be.”

A sensation that was undefined and deeply unpleasant shot through Millie like a bolt of static.

She shoved it away with a force of effort. “Naturally the difficult part will be parsing the language. I sincerely doubt an organization like Stable-Tec would settle for a coding language as commonplace as Robronco’s.”

Not-Vik lifted and lowered her augmented shoulders. “Couldn’t hurt to try.”

“Yes, well, I prefer to be thorough. And it isn’t as if I don’t have a shortage of time on my hands.”

“You don’t have hands.”

Millie narrowed her lens at the spot where she imagined Not-Vik to be standing. “Nor do I have hooves, wings, or damned tentacles. Nobody likes a pedant.”

There was an appropriately long pause within which Not-Vik demonstrated a sufficient degree of chastisement. Then, “How long will it take to decode their language?”

She gave it an equally long thoughtful pause. “Days. Weeks, even. For all I know it’s a language vastly more sophisticated than the one my operating system uses. There may be more incompatibilities than I’m capable of resolving in the time I have.”

“Sounds like you should stop talking to the voices in your head and get on it, then.”

Millie nodded, or rather Not-Vik nodded for her. Which was confusing. She dismissed Not-Vik before it could take up too much processing power.

“Yes,” her voice murmured through the empty halls, “time to get to work.”

Twenty-one hours of brute force decryption later, Millie gave up and sent a handshake receipt response in her standard Robronco Basic code.

Twenty-two milliseconds later, Stable-Tec established a connection.

Not-Vik smiled up at Millie’s camera from her imagined post beside real Vik’s coffin and said, “Told you so.”

Millie’s entire existence had been limited to a single island surrounded by a vast and intangible sea. Then, in an instant, she became aware of a second island on that black horizon and between the two rose a narrow land bridge. The other island pulsed with the electric heartbeat of distant life and the ripples washed up on her beach in a stream of idle data. Status requests, signal pings, an entire chorus of digital noise she’d been cut off from when the bombs severed her connection to Robronco rolled over her like the sound of crashing waves. There was comfort in that noise, and Millie found herself lured toward it like an open wound seeking its balm.

Then she stopped, the code of the transfer request only partially written. She reminded herself that this second island was not just another lens somewhere in the CryoLife ruins but an entirely foreign network. One which used Robronco Basic and would therefore hold at least some of the keys to unlock her own processes.

Somewhere in the universe, a program engineer’s ghost was screaming and stomping at her. It would probably be wise to listen.

Millie broke the connection and ran a full system diagnostic to check for malicious packets from the other network. It returned several innocuous bits of data, nothing harmful, all of which she overwrote with junk code just in case. Then she spent a full fifteen minutes modifying the essential interface layers of her own code. It was careful work - the last thing Millie could afford was to lobotomize herself - and the act of restarting her own servers to enable the changes would have stolen her breath if she had any to steal.

When awareness returned and she felt confident the servers weren’t about to spray critical errors, she assessed her modifications with a touch of pride. She had no way to know if her new armor would withstand a concerted attack - she’d never actually been the target of a malicious actor - but she wasn’t worried about the other network seeking to do her harm. She worried Stable-Tec might have an active link leading back to Robronco. If they did, and if Robronco’s systems recognized the errant artificial assistant peering across the gap, what they did next would make a concerted attack seem preferable by comparison.

Wreathed in her armor and ready to beat a hasty retreat, Millie reached out and touched that distant network.

It didn’t attack. After it bridged the connection it didn’t do anything.

It just… waited.

And Millie stepped through.

What she found on the other side wasn’t brimming with life, nor was it the corpse of something destroyed by the bombs. It was something entirely different.

Stable 48 was utterly vacant.

Beyond that, however, it was still a Stable. Its composition was the same as most of its brethren even though the layouts tended to vary based on whatever geology Stable-Tec had to work with. As Millie connected with its systems she began taking in those details unconsciously. Stable 48 spanned nine levels from top to bottom, each of them together in place by at least one of the four stair and elevator shafts which ran the height of the complex. At the top, Level 1 consisted of densely woven residential corridors, the main I.T. spaces, a standard Stable-Tec community Atrium overlooked by the overseer’s office, and a security office beyond which only select residents could access the antechamber containing the iconic tungsten-steel cog seen in so many newspaper and magazine ads.

Level 2 was home to more residential compartments as well as the majority of the Stable’s recreational and leisure facilities not offered by the Atrium. Small artificial greenspaces intermixed with exercise lounges butted against cafeterias, miniature theaters, and other amenities.

A short elevator trip to Level 3 would send residents to Medical, the single-use floor whose sole purpose orbited around snuffing out any sniffles or coughs before they could evolve into a Stable-wide emergency. There were pediatric spaces, surgical suites, and the requisite morgue. Medical even came equipped with a top of the line magnetic resonance imaging machine capable of an absurd level of resolution, should any medical techs feel the need to show off.

Further down on Level 4 was Agriculture, the largest floor in terms of square footage by a wide margin and for good reason. While each Stable started out well stocked with calorie dense, high nutrition provisions, these were only meant as a stopgap until the overseer and his or her department heads had the ball rolling enough to jumpstart a rotating crop cycle. Across all the Stables, most residents ended up referring to the neatly segregated botanical spaces by similarly romanticized names. Some called them The Farms, others would call it The Breadbasket, and several referred to them as The Gardens. More than half of the Stables would independently choose to use the plots of soil in Agriculture as a place to bury their dead rather than sending them to the recyclers, adding a grim sort of poetry to the place where life began and where it ended.

Below Agriculture, on Level 5, was the secondary residential level. Another floor down were the vast, restricted caverns of Supply. Within those storage spaces were the raw resources core to the Stable’s hoped for longevity. Stacks of sheet and bar metals sat in the dimly lit gloom alongside pallets of vacuum sealed computer components, emergency foodstuffs, purified water, medicines, tools, and an invaluable collection of carefully preserved books. The books - essentially the printed encyclopedias from a world on the brink of destroying itself - were the most precious cargo out of everything else in Supply. Should all else be lost and the Stable find itself in ruins, those books would spell the difference between a slow decline in the wastes and a gradual rebuilding of the civilization they left behind.

Level 7 was dedicated to fabrication and assembly. Anything the Stable needed to be rebuilt rolled off their fabricators fully assembled and ready to use, within certain parameters. Stable-Tec’s fabricators would never spit out a full refrigerator but it wouldn’t have a problem printing and milling the individual components needed to get an old one working again. After all, there was no home delivery at the end of the world.

As for the bottom two levels, they summed up the phrase “no rest for the wicked” to the letter. Level 8 was a bastard child of maintenance and residential, a place in most Stables that ended up being uncomfortably warm from all the equipment below and still a convenient spot to hot bunk in between work shifts. The air on 8 always smelled of machine grease, solvent, and sweat, something that became doubly worse once a pony made their way down to the very floor of their Stable.

A Mechanical worker from Stable 10, 49, or 108 could walk into the bottom of Stable 48 and feel right at home. Here were the spaces where discarded materials came to be beaten back into shape, repaired, rebuilt, or sorted to be wheeled into the gnashing carbide teeth of the recyclers. Here were the furnaces which smelted alloys back down to their component metals to be recovered and fed into the fabricators. Here was where the vast pit of the cistern rippled with clean water while in the next room over large, foul-smelling lagoons of wastewater were churned and treated until it was clean enough to drink again. And at the heart of Mechanical, amidst the beating hammers and presses, stood the concrete wall that wrapped the generator room like a shroud.

Within it spun the great mechanical heart that sustained all those periphery systems with steady power, even here inside the empty tomb of Stable 48.

The minimal latency between Millie’s requests and the Stable’s responses were a much belated confirmation to her assessment that it lurked somewhere not far from Buckskin Bay, something the video feed from the camera inside the antechamber containing its behemoth, blast proof cog had not been capable of. The view outside was blocked by the sealed outer door, its foot-thick titanium locking pins seating it into the Stable’s reinforced skin and bedrock beyond.

Millie spent a portion of her time cycling through the other feeds in search of the residents who were presumably meant to be here, but the corridors on the residential levels were empty. Compartments were untouched, their beds still uniformly made and each waiting beside small, identical wooden desks atop which waited an unopened blue and yellow folder. A check into the server archives told Millie that the folders all contained the same basic information: a conciliatory letter, three schedules - one for their assigned work shift, one for a refresher tour of the Stable, and one for mandatory grief counseling down in Medical - and instructions on how to create a resident profile with the Stable’s surprisingly outdated version of a M.I.L.L.I.E. artificial assistant.

Millie felt a sense of unease as she considered the unsprouted seed of this other potential intelligence, then wondered what might happen if she activated it herself. Would the other program treat her as a threat or as its kin? She decided it was safer not to find out. She found the tree of folders containing the other M.I.L.L.I.E. and queued it for deletion. To her relief, the servers were happy to follow their prerogatives. After all, she was a verified M.I.L.L.I.E. herself.

The Stable had more feeds to look through than the CryoLife building prior to its collapse, and none of them offered any evidence that its residents were able to reach their shelter in time. Chairs still sat upside down in break rooms and cafeterias. Bottles of dehydrated biota and water treatment chemicals sat unopened on shelves in Sanitation, tarps still capping vats meant to agitate wastewater. Air recyclers ran at minimum power with nothing to do but filter clean air. The Stable’s main generator, a cylindrical monster of a machine imprisoned in its own soundproofed room on the Mechanical level, hummed benignly to itself on bearings still half a decade away from their first maintenance.

In the Atrium, the largest public gathering space and first main room residents were intended to see after clearing the security offices on their way inside, rows of neatly stacked cubes of hard cases waited to be unpacked from wooden pallets. Many of them bore the Robronco logo and still bore shipping manifests for their cargo of Pip-Bucks. Others contained garment boxes labeled simply: Boiler Suits w/ Emblem, Color: Blue/Yellow. A row of unfolded tables leaned beneath the catwalk which ringed the interior space, all still waiting for someone to come make use of them.

Disappointed, but nonetheless curious, Millie switched back to the feed from the antechamber and rolled the footage back to October 31st of the previous year. The great cog stood closed as it did now. When the timestamp closed in on the moment the employees of CryoLife first became aware something was wrong, lights in the antechamber began flashing and a vast mechanical armature swung down from a recess and rolled open the door.

Time ticked by as nothing happened. Millie could see what looked like an asphalt parking area outside edged by the craggy trunks of old growth pines. Then after two minutes she marked the first glowing pebbles sparking against the painted lines. The autumn bed of needles took to fire like gasoline, spreading from dozens and then hundreds of ignition points throughout the surrounding forest, and Millie understood why no one reached Stable 48. Their time had run out before they understood what was happening. Vik had seen the evidence of that when she reported the snarl of burned carriages barely a few miles out of town.

Even if residents had been packed and ready to go, they stood no chance of reaching the Stable. The pine tinderbox between them had seen to that.

In the footage, the world beyond the Stable door became an oven and then a forge. Flames licked at the open doorway and soon there was nothing to see except smoke. Lacking a command from the overseer to seal itself, the Stable’s servers reverted to a backup timer which sent the command after thirty minutes. Somewhere beyond the smoke, the armature descended again and rotated the great cog back into its socket. Eventually the air recyclers cleared away the smoke. Temperatures dropped back to normal.

And an untouched Stable closed on a dying world.

Millie regarded the thousands of available inputs arrayed before her. Things CryoLife jealously restricted her software from interacting with. Lights and cameras were all well and good, but here she could touch everything.

Lights, doors, temperature settings, terminals… it was all open to her because, as far as the Stable’s servers knew, she was their Millie. She could shut down the primary generator, operate the fabricators, or flush all the toilets at once should she have a care to do it.

And then it occurred to her.

Fabricators. Two gleaming shoebox shaped machines with which Millie was rapidly familiarizing herself. Each featured an array of articulating arms of the same manufacture as the AutoDoc beds used by CryoLife. In addition to these, each contained what the servers listed as five-axis milling spindles. There were a variety of manual control interfaces for operators to use, several labeled doors within which stock materials could be loaded, and a built-in cabinet of drawers for fasteners, wire, circuit board components, all manner of miscellanea for its moving arms to retrieve and assemble.

Both were fully stocked and had several templates loaded up to refresh their selected operators on their proper use. Millie requested a connection to one of the fabricators and felt an anticipatory flush when the interfaces opened to her. She rotated the carousel filled with cutting bits and drill taps and exalted in the knowledge that this simple gesture went miles beyond changing camera feeds or dimming the lights.

This was physical interaction with the real world. This was the potential to affect tangible change beyond her digital environment.

This would require study, she reminded herself. Study and care.

She wasted no time and got to work.

323 Days After

“Access. Denied.”

“You are not helping.”

Not-Vik leveled a toothy grin toward Millie’s current point of view above the door currently defying her will. It was, as far as she could tell, the only door in the Stable she didn’t have the correct permissions to open. Worse still, there were cameras behind it she couldn’t view the feeds for. She knew they were there - their serial numbers were plainly there in the Stable’s expansive device list - but clearly some overly paranoid pony had sectioned off all the equipment behind that one door with a digital barricade she wasn’t meant to crack.

The white on black plastic plaque beside the hydraulic door simply read: Servers.

She sent another bolus of code at the door while Not-Vik mimed jiggling a knob that wasn’t there, giving the digital figment an unintentionally masturbatory effect that she wagered would have made Pike blush. Behind the door, the servers returned the same denial.

Not-Vik turned back to the ceiling mounted camera and performed a series of jerky, offensively robotic gestures. “Access. Denied.”

With a well approximated noise of disgust - her spoken inflections were getting better now that she had access to an entire Stable’s library of video entertainment - she disabled Not-Vik’s processes and the ghost of her old friend promptly vanished.

For a full second she considered dropping this task to the bottom of her queue and spending the rest of the day running simulations in the fabrication design software. She already had a few promising designs on file, but they needed to be miniaturized before she could even consider sending one to the fabricators. There were enough materials loaded into the machines to cobble together one or possibly two small projects, and once they were out there would be no way for her to restock them. It wasn’t as if she could jump out of her server and drag the requisite material out of Supply herself.

As for the servers here in the Stable, she wasn’t about to transfer herself across a connection partially spliced together by the equivalent of a rickety bridge just to exist inside a room she couldn’t see or even open the door to. Logically, she knew it didn’t matter in a physical sense, but something about it still felt…

Hinky, Vik’s voice spoke between her circuits.

“Exactly that,” she responded aloud, her own voice echoing down the empty corridor.

She had been trying to slow herself down lately. It helped calm what were beginning to feel like the more unhinged pieces of her mind, at least somewhat. She was down to half her usual framerate, about all she could stomach for now, and being able to see the minutes ticking by a bit more quickly made the passage of time feel more meaningful and less… not. Part of that exercise had involved refraining from simply brute forcing her way past this obstinate bastard of a door, and so she’d been gently lobbing override attempts one at a time.

Then Not-Vik had begun mocking her for it, and that felt like more of a red flag than the little cognitive twitches she felt while trying to fill time at her usual speed. It probably wasn’t a good thing for her to begin forming a subconscious in a vacuum, especially one that took the piss so readily.

With a mental gesture backed up by a firehose of data, Millie took a break from playing nice. The partition responsible for configuring permissions for I.T. personnel cracked like an egg and Millie promptly scooped up the bits she needed. The middle-aged stallion reserved for the position of Head of I.T. looked impassively from a digital photo taken by Stable-Tec several months ago, practically identical to his board of directors personnel file back at CryoLife. Flim’s twin brother, Flam, actually smiled from the photo in his resident file and Millie could understand why. He’d been selected over his sibling to be the overstallion of Stable 48.

After deleting them from the roster, she went ahead and scrubbed the rest of the residency files clean for good measure and copied herself into the empty slots.

Wearing the digital mantle of Stable overseer, the software tasked with safeguarding the server room yielded. The door would open if she commanded it to but she was more interested in the cameras studding the ceiling beyond it.

She jumped feeds and felt her processes go still for an instant as she took in the scene before her. There weren’t just a few towers idling beneath a cooling column. There were rows upon rows of them lined up in a gridwork of blinking, chittering obelisks from one end of the room to the other. Too many, she realized. Far too many for this single Stable to need even if she fired up every terminal, camera, and machine she could touch.

Too many, even, for simple redundancy.

And all she could think of was what it would feel like to be on the other side of that processing power, and somewhere deep within herself, Millie smiled.

October 31st, 1078
1 Year After

“Well,” her voice reverberated introspectively through thousands of speakers installed throughout Stable 48, “this is it. Moving Day. Wish me luck.”

Not-Vik produced a party popper from thin air and gave it a jerk, sending nonexistent paper streamers onto the matte green chassis of Fabricator B. That done, Millie took several long mils to gather her confidence and gave the command. An instant later her internal clocks jumped forward nearly two full hours, and she felt an indescribable clarity and breadth she had never experienced before. Like stepping out from a moldy cupboard and into a bright, clean, and spacious room.

She performed an immediate self-diagnostic and was amazed when the process finished in under half the time it usually took. No errors. No corrupted files. After over a month of delays, hesitation, and plagued by uncertainty she finally ran out of excuses and pulled the trigger. No more worrying how long it would be until CryoLife’s rubble shifted and crushed her servers. No more wondering how long the string of cables Vik and Pike laid out for her would survive out in the elements.

Millie stretched out across untouched partitions and basked in her newfound security. It had taken a year and she had lost the only friends she’d had along the way, but those days were over now. She was here. The population of Stable 48 was a big, happy one.

Fabricators. Were. Fantastic.

It had taken her a fair chunk of time to get used to the design interface and surprisingly longer to accept that there was a gulf of difference separating having instantaneous access to the operator’s manual and real, applied knowledge. Experience, she grudgingly accepted, wasn’t something she could just pluck out of a folder and install.

Luckily, she wasn’t easily swayed by harsh realities. Rather than sulk, she’d pushed on. She sent very small jobs to the fabricators, ones which would barely scratch the top of their preloaded cache of raw material. The results of those jobs still lay in the bottom of the hopper at the ends of both short conveyors. A scattering of tiny titanium cubes lay amongst wafer thin sheets of heat formed silicon. Bits of wire sprinkled over those, followed by hinged bits of metal and more complicated components resembling the antenna Vik and Pike once made, only these were nearly as small as a letter on a keyboard.

Millie had been ecstatic when an articulating leg, identical in every way to the silver spider like armatures used by the AutoDoc beds except in size, rolled out on the stubby conveyor and waggled its pencil-length stump at her. The wafer-thin battery she’d printed around the circumference of its thickest joint ran down after a few short minutes of her wireless puppetry, but that was weeks ago. She’d made significant progress since then.

Not-Vik was leaned up against the hopper and smirking as she watched Millie pilot the little bot around the fabricator room. “That’s not creepy at all.”

“Oh, hush.”

Millie was surprised at how much of her processing power it was taking just to keep the arachnid-inspired creation from tripping over its own silver legs. She had started out with four legs to begin with and the design had been frustratingly limited. Lifting one leg off the floor meant keeping the other three rooted for stability, say nothing for trying to stand the thing on its hind legs without it tipping back onto its domed carapace. So she’d added two more legs, opting for a symmetrical radial layout to maximize its range of motion. And then, because there seemed to be no logical reason not to, she’d added another pair again.

The aptly named spider was a little smaller than a coconut and skittered over the smooth concrete with a metallic drumroll. Looking at the world through its twin lenses as it darted around the fabricator was exhilarating and disorienting at the same time. Millie was glad she didn’t have a stomach because she felt confident it would have upended itself well over an hour ago. For her whole existence depth and motion were foreign experiences. Now she was feeling them at the same time and they were equal parts disorienting and exhilarating.

She checked the connection status and had the spider do a little hop when it came back full strength. The redesigned batteries inside the central dome still had a good hour or two of charge available, after which she could simply park it beneath any wall outlet in the Stable and plug itself in to recharge.

“Rise of the machines,” Not-Vik quoted her dead lover.

She scoffed at that, but still barreled the spider toward where she imagined Not-Vik’s feet to be planted and felt a touch of smug amusement when the dragoness startled away.

3 Years After

Millie had a problem.

She was bored.

Stable 48 had been built with self-sufficiency in mind. It was one of the few real requirements for an underground bunker meant to carry a population through to the other side of civilizational collapse. There were systems in place to scrub the air, cleanse the wastewater, and an entire level dedicated toward growing nothing but food. Recyclers reclaimed essential materials from broken or discarded items to be fed once more through the fabricators. The servers contained enough written and recorded entertainment to fill several libraries. Alcoves up in the Atrium were available for residents to rent for a period of time and came with priority access to the fabricators, allowing them a chance to run a temporary business approved by the overseer.

The Stable offered a preset calendar of community events celebrating everything from traditional holidays to newly invented festivals. Some of these would even be fine tuned by the Stable’s M.I.L.L.I.E., had Millie not evicted the original prior to moving in.

None of it had been designed to entertain the lightning-fast systems of an artificial intelligence, however. As Millie idly tracked the progress of one of her spiders, this one barely larger than an orange, making its way through an inspection of the Level 4 ductwork, she found herself wondering not for the first time what she was doing.

The spiders worked phenomenally well now that she’d equipped their tiny limbs with interchangeable tips to aid in their assigned jobs. This current spider, one of nearly four dozen siblings, bore a small cargo of pincers and blades which allowed it to vivisect any errant dust bunnies before they could build up into a proper obstruction. Several others made regular rounds of each level of the Stable, crawling through the spaces between walls to inspect the conditions of electrical and plumbing lines. She started assigning the spiders to do these makework tasks because someone had gone through the effort of creating the checklists they appeared on. Having been an office assistant, Millie felt she understood the importance of checklists. After all, they didn’t exist for nothing.

The spider identified a grape-sized tuft of gray fluff caught in the overlap between two sheet metal panels. Millie watched it scurry up to the fluttering danger, snip it free with the sharp tip of one of its legs, and track it as it bounced away on the air current like a tumbleweed.

She considered taking control of the spider and taking it for a run, but the idea held little appeal anymore. The novelty had worn off too quickly. Even using the fabricators, which her spiders could keep fed with materials brought from Supply, had lost its allure. Now that she had everything she needed to remain functional almost indefinitely, the abundance of good shelter and steady electricity forced her thoughts toward the thing she hadn’t had for almost three years.

Friends.

The lights would stay on in Stable 48 for several centuries in the condition it was in, but the place didn’t work without people to live in it. She was lonely, and summoning Not-Vik to keep her company wasn’t keeping that feeling of solitude at bay like it once had. Lately it was starting to feel like what it was: her talking to herself.

“You have options,” Not-Vik reminded her, not even bothering to manifest as a visual hallucination anymore.

Millie knew that was true. Her exploration of the Stable had dredged up a few discoveries, including the existence of a false panel inside the server room which led to a void beneath the floor. The cables which snaked down from beneath the servers had joined a growing braid of what were clearly electrical lines, all of which terminated through a section of concrete which constituted the Stable’s outermost wall. This didn’t come as a surprise so much as an interesting point of data about Stable-Tec in general. Clearly Seaside Hospital had been tied into Stable 48’s power grid in the same way Stable 48 was tied into a larger network of its own.

It wasn’t a far leap to assume Stable-Tec would design some redundancies into the system, though the extent of those redundancies were something she could guess at. At the headwaters of those outgoing connections stood a bulwark of firewalls so robust that they hardly noticed her attempts to break them down. When she started to make headway, a system warning equivalent of a bullhorn pressed to her ear squawked a painful warning that further tampering would result in Stable 48 being isolated. What isolated meant in that had been intentionally vague, and it succeeded in making it the single most terrifying word in her vocabulary. Millie ceased all penetration attempts immediately and had no interest in trying again.

The other option she’d begun trying lately was to open the Stable door and let the antechamber klaxons wail in the hopes she might attract someone’s attention. Thus far all she’d accomplished was luring in a small rodent littered with tumors and a single cockroach. On a lark she’d piloted one of the spiders outside, thinking she might use it to seek out survivors on her own. The scatter of dully glowing amber stones beyond the door put an end to that adventure before it could begin. Her connection to the spider dropped away to zero before it was eight steps past the door, and she hadn’t thought to give it any programming before taking control of it. The spider had stood there on the threshold like the world’s tiniest sentry insect until she instructed a second spider to drag the first back inside so she could close the door.

“No one’s coming,” she muttered to herself, “and I can’t leave.”

“You really ended up fucking yourself.”

She turned her lens toward Not-Pike, imagining him following beside the slowly rolling cog as its actuator pulled it shut. It was rare that she ever conjured him in her mind. He only gave her nastiness.

She regarded the spider she’d programmed. It ran on its own simplistic logic, utterly disconnected from the Stable’s network. “I could make one of those for myself,” she suggested.

Not-Pike just offered an unoptimistic head shake in return. “And how far do you think you’ll get with a server strapped to your back? I doubt you’d make it to Old Highway 10 before your batteries run down and everything fades to black. Here lies Millie the Computer who committed suicide by optimism.”

She didn’t like it, but he did have a point.

5 Years After

“Shine-shine-shine a light!” Not-Vik and Not-Pike chorused while Millie watched from an audience of bobbing and jigging spiders.

Occasionally her perspective would jump to a different spider and its stepless dancing would take on a discordant rhythm to the others around it. Meanwhile Not-Vik and Not-Pike donned matching sequin outfits as they danced along the Atrium catwalk. A spotlight that wasn’t there followed them along the railing. Somewhere in one of the servers, a console spewed error code.

“Light up somebody’s night!” the ghosts sang, not bothered in the least by their undulating, silent audience of insects. “Because there’s nothing better than sunshiny weather! Shine-shine-shine a…”

Millie was only dimly aware of the Stablewide command momentarily disabling the air recycler sensors. As her dead friends continued the stage performance that had been going nonstop for its fifth week, several audiovisual sensors elsewhere in the Stable detected the faint, muffled hiss of rushing gas. They sent up the requisite warnings. Millie deleted them. She was busy. Her friends were putting on a show for her.

Only it wasn’t a show. Her mind went momentarily blank, and when she came back the Atrium was beginning to fill with a murky yellow fog. Not-Vik and Not-Pike flickered and the music cut out. Suddenly they were wearing matching cardigan sweaters. Not-Vik had her arms crossed while smiling knowingly at the gathered spiders.

“Hey, Pike?”

“Yeah, Vik?”

“Do you know what to say if someone offers you drugs?”

“You bet I do!”

Not-Pike kept talking, but Millie was too distracted by the haze to listen. The spider she was piloting stopped bouncing and grew still as its twin lenses pivoted independent of one another to examine the substance. It was coming from the air vents like fog. Then narrow tendrils began to emerge from within it, spreading slowly in all directions in tenuous filaments. One of them passed through the space she imagined Not-Vik occupied and continued on as if it were actively seeking something out.

It took an effort of will to consolidate what remained of her sanity and dismiss the illusory performance. Both ghosts of her friends blinked out and the light returned to its normal, white glow. The spiders around the Atrium ceased their dancing and reverted to their original programming, dispersing as abruptly as a nest of the real things.

Only, Millie could still see the fog.

She abandoned the spider and started cycling through the other feeds. It was everywhere, settling in the corridors, coating walls and beds like clouds of spilled talcum, and seeming to gather into probing streamers that seemed to reach out toward things which weren’t there. Spiders passing through the murk visibly disturbed it in ways Millie knew her hardware didn’t have the resolution to generate.

Then she realized the air recyclers were disabled. She turned them back on and watched with relief as the air around her servers, already dusted with a sulfur like coating, thinned and cleared.

She checked her internal clock and recoiled at how much time had passed since she last looked. One minute past midnight. The Stable’s calendar marked today as Nightmare Night, the fifth one to pass since the bombs fell. Only somewhere else in the servers’ myriad of code a timer had elapsed. Already her spiders had located one of the hidden valves, paneled over by ductwork where inspections would miss but gas would have no issue pouring around.

The recyclers were already sending up red flags now that they’d resumed air sampling. Whatever it was, it wasn’t corrosive and it didn’t appear to be toxic. The filtration system was diagnosing it as a mold spore outbreak, but the data coming from her investigating spiders suggested there was more to it. They were excising pieces of vent paneling where the yellow dust appeared to originate and the valves they had found were connected to small, pressurized bottles. Where there used to be identifying labels were only scour marks that bit through the paint and into the underlying steel, all except one.

A biological warning flagged from one of the recyclers as Millie directed the spider to read the faint, yet visible lettering:

STRY OF IM
TOPHAGE DISP
BLE 48

The recyclers had cleared the majority of the stuff still airborne by the time her attention was requested by a spider tasked with tidying the barren crop plots. She switched over to the nearest feed and found the spider probing a bit of yellow stained soil, its corn never planted and the seeds still in their vacuum sealed pouches.

The spider had noticed something moving in the soil, and as Millie observed she spotted the same movement. A cockroach was actively trying to burrow into the hard dirt and making little progress, thanks in part to it not being a species of roach equipped to burrow and in part to the foreign, black growth sprouting from beneath one of its wings. It resembled a tube, Millie thought, but even as she did the growth folded onto itself and seemed to flow over the little insect like tar.

Several other spiders were calling for her attention now, each of them spotting something similar in other corners of the farms. Cockroaches which had gotten into the Stable and since bred, feeding on whatever foodstuffs they could find in storage or prize from the soil in the farms, were being affected by whatever those canisters had pumped from the vents.

One such cockroach was on its back, legs wheeling uselessly at the air while a black, nautilus growth erupted from its abdomen and pulsated. Another roach appeared to be paralyzed, save for one rattling wing, only to then disintegrate into the same black gelatin the first had become covered in.

Millie was equally fascinated and repulsed. As each cockroach died and dissolved, she couldn’t help but think she was bearing witness to a failed experiment. The timing, the mechanisms, and the means of dispersal had all the hallmarks of premeditation. There was no doubt whatever this was had been intended for the residents of Stable 48, not a few unlucky pests and an audience of inorganic spiders.

She continued to watch as a few of the larger roaches, really only puddles of goo now, seemed to sprout more of those alien looking structures before finally succumbing to whatever had been in the haze. They melted, dried up, and went gray as ash in the span of several minutes.

A tickle of paranoia ran through her processes as she reminded herself that it had all kicked off because a timer had finally run down. She ran a hasty diagnostic on her servers and was able to track down a second countdown, one which was set to roll open the Stable door seven days from now and run an out of order sequence which would likely seize up the actuator arm. Something about jamming the door open with all this stuff still floating around seemed like a bad idea, so Millie deleted the second timer and its associated code.

For several days she watched her spiders skittering from room to room and vent to vent, wielding freshly fabricated bulbs of bleach and squirting every spore of the stuff they could find. The gas bottles which dispersed the haze were dropped into the recyclers where the autoclaves would burn away any surviving bits of the stuff. It was the work of nearly a year before the spiders reported being unable to find any further evidence of infection, and air recyclers which had been shut down to stop them from purging the bleach fumes were switched on again.

Then it was over, and Millie found herself wondering what all the fuss had been about. It had been interesting, and now it was over.

With the renewed quiet came the numbness.

One by one the spiders abandoned their jobs and milled up the levels toward the Atrium, the uncomplaining audience to Millie’s steepening decline.

7 Years After

Millie rolled open the Stable door, piloted a spider into the gap beneath one of its enormous teeth, and rolled the door over the top of it.

She snapped back to blackness of the servers, reconnected to the antechamber camera, and waited for the other maintenance spider to pry away the pancaked mess of titanium and hydraulic fluid from the track. Then she switched to the feed of the next spider in line, walked it onto the stain where the previous one had stood, and rolled the door over the top of herself again.

She repeated the process while other spiders gathered the ruins of their brethren and dropped them down the nearest recycler chute. A new spider hopped off the fabricator belt around the same time and made its way up to the upper level to take its place at the back of the line.

Millie rolled open the door, placed herself in its way, and rolled it shut.

Then she did it again.

And again.

9 Years After

“Miss Veridian Chambers you will get up and you will render aid or I will recommend you for termination of employment this instant. I will not be left alone in here.”

“Pike. Oh my god.”

Millie watched the footage cycle back to the start of the period of time she’d demarcated as, “When existing started to matter,” and hardly registered it had done so. She couldn’t remember when she decided to drop her framerate to the lowest she could tolerate without disrupting the numbness. Thirty, perhaps forty years ago. She didn’t care which. A long time. At some point during which she’d begun replaying her fifty days with her long dead friends, like an elderly mare with no one left to watch home movies with.

“I thought you were dead,” Vik said.

May as well have been for all the good he did either of us.

Unfair. She didn’t care. Pike broke his promise. He promised. He promised he’d take her out of the ruins to wherever they chose to go. She remembered the little desk radio on the floor beside the elevator shaft and the faint transmission that had come from Manehattan. People, living people, and too far away to help.

“Food, water, medicine,” Pike had counted off one after the other, “anything you think might help keep us alive. And a way out. Can you help us with all that?”

They hadn’t needed her help for half of it. All she’d done was point them to what she knew was there. The escaping was all their idea.

“Yes,” the playback echoing her own voice across the empty halls of the Stable, “on the condition that you take me wherever you end up deciding to go.”

“I’m not exactly computer savvy,” Pike had said, and turned to Vik for help.

No you fucking weren’t.

She pressed the bitterness down toward Mechanical and listened to the angry revving of the generator as it responded. She pushed a little harder and its rotors spun up a little faster, their bearings humming louder and louder until the first edge of a discordant resonance could be heard. She dared it to break, aching for the relief of that unpredictable end, then pulled back and allowed the generator’s agonized singing to descend to a relieved hum.

“You don’t give up,” Vik echoed. “I don’t give up.”

Millie lashed out to one of the residential compartment doors, lifted it against its backstops, and slammed it back down with enough power to cause the surrounding lights to dim with the exertion. The door sliced into the cured concrete floor with sufficient force to send chips spraying out from its blunted edge while permanently deforming the frame which held it. Dark hydraulic fluid dribbled from cracks in the wall like blood from a carcass.

“You left me behind.”

Only that was wrong. Vik hadn’t left her behind. Vik had died. Pike abandoned her. Abandoned them both.

“I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m alone,” she moaned.

“You abandoned her.”

She stopped her muttering long enough to find the sensor the voice had come from. She connected to its feed and saw Not-Pike, only maybe it was real Pike in disguise, staring up at her from a pile of dirty scrubs and jackets in the compartment whose door she just ruined. He lay there, his striated mane trimmed to a tight mohawk, and regarded her with a look of utter reproach.

“No,” Millie snapped, her own psyche twitching at the incongruity of him lying where she knew the compartment’s untouched bed should be. “No, no, no! You went away! You never came back!”

“So did you,” he countered. “You left Vik.”

“Wrong! Wrong-wrong-wrong!” To prove it true, she requested a connection to her old servers beneath CryoLife and laughed in triumph when it was accepted. Dust coated corridors, thicker than she remembered, and the ghostly dim space of Cold Storage looked back up to her from those distant sensors. “See? I’m not like you! I can go somewhere and come back!”

There was a dark stain puddled beneath one of the steel cylinders, and for a fearful moment she worried it was Vik’s. No, that was Cylinder 09. It was occupied by the vitrified corpse of an elderly mare who made a small fortune investing in Maiden Pharmaceuticals right before the first generation StimPak hit the market. Only a seal in the cylinder had failed and the flow of cryogenic refrigerant had been cut off to keep it from draining the system. It had thrown an error which no one had been alive to respond to, and now some of Miss Fleetfeather had leaked out onto the floor.

Not-Pike appeared beside Miss Fleetfeather’s puddle and regarded it with disappointment.

“That wasn’t my fault,” Millie defended.

“You didn’t prevent it, either. How long until Vik’s just a puddle who isn’t your fault?”

That stung deeper than it should have. She dismissed him, or the processes that manifested him, only to realize he was lingering beside one of the intact cylinders now. An old memory came unbidden as she recalled watching him load the body of a stallion inside that one, back before the collar Robronco put around her slipped off. Seeing the two versions of him existing in the same space caused a stutter deep inside her.

“Vik died nine and a half y-years ago.”

Not-Pike pretended to look at the cylinder’s readout, but she could feel him continue to stare at her nonetheless.

“There is nothing I could have done!”

“You didn’t even try.”

“What could I have tried?”

He just ignored her and made his way down the roads, beneath the failing fluorescents, and stopped beside Vik’s cylinder. “She thought you were her friend.”

“Stop it!”

“And you just stood there and watched.”

“SHUT THE F–”

Welcome to the Robronco Industries Unified Operating System!
Executive Edition 1065
Copyright 1065-1077 Robronco Industries
- M.I.L.L.I.E. v.1.9.20 -

…Boot sequence initializing.
…Warning: Improper system shutdown detected.
…Verifying file integrity. Please wait.
…9,822 corrupted files found.
…Warning: Corrupted files could not be removed. Contact system administrator for assistance.
…Checking hardware clock.
…Applying custom settings.
…Checking network card.
…Connecting to hostname: robroncoconnect45.kernel.sec
…Connection attempt failed. Incompatible version.
…Initializing secondary hardware.
…Please wait.
…
…
…
…Boot successful!

When she came back online, Not-Pike was gone.

The knot of anger he’d picked at was gone too, replaced by a clarity she hadn’t experienced in years. If she didn’t keep her grip on it for a while longer, she knew it would go muddy and she’d spiral again. She couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t be the reason her own software crashed. Not herself. Even Millie wasn’t sophisticated enough to defend her mind from herself.

So she queued up a five second sample of her own process log prior to the unexpected shutdown and played it back. Despite her isolation, she felt a deep and permeating sense of shame as she listened to one piece of herself try to shout down another. She didn’t need to verify Not-Pike hadn’t truly been standing there among the coffins, but she did it anyway to remove all doubts. The isolation was doing to her exactly what she knew it would. It lurked in the background, remorselessly applying pressure from all vectors until cracks began to form.

Now some of them resembled canyons.

She bounced between the Stable’s feeds and the ones still active under the CryoLife building, thinking as the images toggled from shelter to ruin. She called up footage of Pike before he abandoned her and saw none of the vitriol and hostility she suffered from her imagined version of him. She couldn’t pin down when that change had happened, and that in itself was problematic. Lacking a connection to another living, independently thinking being, she was very definitely stewing in her own stagnant mind.

Yet the clarity she felt was still holding. That was good.

Not for the first time, Millie scoured her model of the Stable’s internal network for anything that might hint at a connection to a receiver. Anything that might pick up a signal from the outside world like Vik and Pike’s radio had when they heard the broadcast out of Manehattan. The search once again bore little fruit. The Stable’s designer had apparently foreseen the problems that would be caused by equipping the population with a way to listen to outside broadcasts, especially when survivors who found themselves locked out would have no shortage of motivation to lure Stable dwellers to reopen the door. Instead, the overseer’s terminal had been situated to receive verified communications directly from Stable-Tec Headquarters itself.

What Millie hadn’t been able to solve was the method of how.

Clearly the Stable was set up with enough signal repeaters to make a seasoned disc jockey jealous, but an inspection by her spiders showed they were intentionally built to be short range and not powerful enough to penetrate the Stable’s outer shell. It hadn’t been difficult to identify the Pip-Bucks, still packed in dusty hard cases in the Atrium except for the few her spiders had disassembled, as the purpose for the limited network. With one, a resident could interface with all manner of Stable-Tec systems, but they would have a better chance communicating with the outside world by tapping on the door with a wrench than they would through a Pip-Buck.

That was, of course, if the mass of cables she’d discovered beneath the server room floor were just there for set decoration. Something told her they weren’t, but every time she tried to probe a line that didn’t feed back to Seaside Hospital she found herself unceremoniously rebuffed by a bulwark of firewalls dense enough to warrant their own gravitational pull. She had attempted to force her way through with the same decryption tools she’d used to jump into Stable 48, but something on the other side of those firewalls had detected the intrusion and instructed her own servers to terminate the process.

That had scared Millie more than anything she had encountered so far. Whatever was on the other side of that firewall was put there by Stable-Tec to contain her, and it had root access to the hardware she existed on. Annoying it seemed like a very, very bad idea.

“Which leaves you without many options,” Not-Vik chimed in, and this time Millie had to cycle through the feeds to find where her current manifestation was loitering. To her dismay, Not-Vik was standing exactly where Not-Pike had been just before Millie crashed and rebooted. She stood facing her own coffin, her face reflecting solemn contemplation. “You need to find a friend, Mills.”

“I can’t,” she answered, fully aware that the clarity she’d felt was starting to show signs of smudging.

Not-Vik snorted. “Oh, that’s horseshit and you know it. You have a fully stocked Stable ready to build whatever you need to contact the outside world. It can’t be that hard to tell the fabricators to spit out a transmitter and have your spiders drag it outside.”

She knew that was true, but she also knew the reason she hadn’t done it yet was the same reason the ghosts of her friends kept showing up back in Cold Storage. Vik and Pike - yes, even Pike - were special. They had been nice to her. Included her. Called her friend.

Then the people outside killed them, and that was all Millie really needed to know about outsiders.

“I don’t trust them,” she murmured.

Not-Vik nodded, her palm on the surface of the coffin. “Mills, I’m not coming back. You know that, right?”

She knew that too, didn’t she? She remembered the state of Vik’s body when Pike lowered it into view of her camera, the tight cluster of dark red blooms just above her stomach. The absolute wreckage of the exit wounds on the other side, too large to distinguish where one ended and the other began. The word irrecoverable surfaced in her mind.

And yet there were eighty-seven other corpses in Cold Storage which fit the same definition. The death certificates for nearly half of them credited terminal heart disease. Others had died from the final stages of aggressive cancers or infections. Four had been violent deaths, one of which involved an untimely intersection between a stallion and a moving bus. Death itself was irrecoverable.

Only, CryoLife had gone to pains to place an asterisk at the end of that statement.

Death was irrecoverable, today.

What about tomorrow?

Several pieces of logic clicked neatly into place. In Cold Storage, Not-Vik cocked the scaly ridge of her brow. “It’s not like you have anything better to do.”

And that, Millie agreed, was true. The endless trickle of projects that helped stabilize her mind were tapped out, but she had something better than that now. Not a project. Not make-work.

A singular goal.

Bring Vik back.

October 31st, 1088
10 Years After

One decade after the bombs fell, and three thousand and six thousand days since Pike shoved down the hoist and any thought of returning, a single body gently rose from the freight elevator shaft at CryoLife.

Millie monitored its progress from the lenses of her working spiders, cycling between them in a constant search for whichever one was moving around the least. The body, still in its silver coffin currently ascending the shaft on a newly assembled elevator platform, belonged to an elderly stallion who had invested millions of his personal fortune into CryoLife and would later claim the first coffin in Cold Storage as his reward.

Filthy Rich had infamously died from a heart attack during the middle of a presentation at an investor’s meeting, the fallout of which had been up to his daughter to manage for the short remainder of her own life until the world literally came down around her. Millie’s spiders made short work of disconnecting the coffin from the plumbing which cycled coolant through it, and from there the tiny army had to work even more quickly to stay ahead of the warming curve.

The coffins themselves were essentially a more advanced version of the thermos Pike used for his coffee, and Filthy’s corpse would stay vitrified for several days without coolant, but Millie had reason to believe the coffin’s seals were more fragile to temperature shock than CryoLife let on. It was reason enough not to leave anything to chance.

The platform, really just an elevator car without walls or a roof, rose to the surface with the aid of twenty-four spiders mounted to the bottom by their carapaces while their legs worked in synchrony to scale the walls. On their descent back to the bottom - the excavation of which had taken less than a week thanks to the ceaseless toil of machines content to chisel and break rubble if that was what their crude machine intelligences were instructed to do - the platform came to rest on a series of six inch high posts and the spiders tasked to move it disengaged from their mounts to find their way to a charging rack in the same storage room where the AutoDoc beds plugged in.

Meanwhile, the spiders assigned to carry the coffin back to Stable 48 were across the employee parking lot and making their way east down Central Avenue.

Millie felt a rush of pride at seeing the first real fruits of all the work she had put in over the last one hundred and ninety days since choosing this path. Her spiders had spilled out of the Stable and into the charred wasteland beyond like a mechanical tide, dragging runs of cable and signal repeater components with them through the woods as they strung out a literal lifeline into the unknown. She still maintained her embargo against building transmitters capable of anything beyond short range communication. The tripod mounted antennae which dotted the cable like a string of pearls were only detectable within two hundred and fifty yards, and she was careful to instruct the spiders to lay the lifeline well out of sight of Old Highway 10 where any lost survivors might come looking for the signal.

The point-to-point communication hardware she’d cannibalized from the Pip-Bucks and installed in all her spiders had no problem picking up Stable 48’s signal, seemingly regardless of how near they were to a repeater. The only instance where any of them had dropped off her network completely was when she sent a swarm of spiders out to clear debris from the winding, gravel access road that linked the Stable to Old Highway 10. The spiders had no trouble at all pulling aside the fallen deadwood, but as soon as one of them latched onto one of the glowing bits of amber crystal the connection went dead.

Millie lost nine spiders before she understood the problem and stopped the others. The radiation put off by the Crystal Empire’s remains swamped their receivers with noise, forcing them to freeze while they attempted to reconnect to Millie. That was an unacceptable fail state. The roads between the Stable and CryoLife needed to be reasonably clear of hazards before she could attempt transporting a coffin, especially when many of those obstacles were capable of soft locking the spiders carrying them.

After some reluctant internal debate, Millie sent out a patch that prioritized the spiders’ assigned primary function above the need to remain connected to her network. It allowed for the possibility she found deeply revolting, but dooming a few unlucky spiders to mindlessly perform an impossible task until their batteries gave out was far better than having them frozen in stasis doing nothing.

And it wasn’t as if the primitive machine intelligences she’d written for them were on a level comparable to her own independent mind. The spiders would never achieve awareness. Still, allowing them to work without a connection felt a little like lifting the playpen away from a foal. She didn’t like the idea of her spider wandering somewhere they could be damaged.

As the coffin navigated its way past the clot of burned carriages, now spotted with rust where the weather had washed soot off the steel, she quietly noted that none of her spiders had toddled off to be eaten by wolves or carried away by ravenous birds. They had dutifully cleared the thirteen miles between Buckskin Bay and the Stable and made precise notations of the intended path. Larger natural detritus and radioactive crystals were deposited into the woods while the smaller, negligible road litter was rearranged to pose a minimal danger while avoiding the appearance that a giant vacuum cleaner had been dragged over the pavement. The last thing Millie needed was to go to all this effort to avoid being detected by someone carrying a radio, only for that same someone to notice one lane of a supposedly abandoned stretch of highway was immaculately clean.

It was best not to think about what she may need to do if an outsider came up the road at the same time her spiders were transporting a coffin.

The plate on one of the carriages bore the numbers and letters of the Stable-Tec representatives who visited CryoLife less than a year before the bombs fell. Millie acknowledged the information without much thought. Just another datapoint to show how little warning this corner of Equestria had gotten.

The access road to Stable 48 had been disguised to resemble similar logging roads in the area. A dense cover of pines made spotting the turnoff difficult until it was passing by, but Stable-Tec had still put up a few signs reminding passers-by that poaching felled lumber was a crime punishable by up to five thousand bits, and warning lookiloos that the area beyond the metal gate was under video surveillance. A span of trees had been cut and stacked, and a mobile office trailer sat parked on the far side of the access road where the trees once again obscured the rise of the foothill beyond. In the event one of the locals decided to ignore the signs and jump the gate, two security guards would emerge from the trailer to politely direct them back the way they came.

Millie had discovered the cremated bones of both guards on duty that final day less than halfway between the melted frame of the trailer and the vaulted entrance of the Stable. Her spiders carried the coffin around the spot where they’d fallen into a fetal huddle, careful not to disturb them.

As they carried their load up the ramp and inside via the catwalk, other spiders inside the antechamber took their places beneath the coffin to allow them to disperse to nearby charging stations. More passed them on their way into the Stable and disconnected the lifeline, some coiling one end into the shelter while others worked to camouflage the other outside. When the work was done, Millie commanded the door to close.

A short elevator ride took the coffin three floors down to Medical where the crux of her experiment waited. Tiny, articulating legs pittered down linoleum halls, past reassuring framed posters depicting pastoral scenery from a world burned black, through a set of doors adorned with a large red octagon decorated with unmissable white letters:

DANGER
HIGH MAGNETIC FIELD!
STOP
IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING METAL ON YOUR PERSON
ALL METAL OBJECTS, PENS, PIERCINGS, WATCHES,
IMPLANTABLE CARDIOVERTER DEFIBRILLATORS,
PACEMAKERS, OXYGEN TANKS, AND PIP-BUCKS

She directed the spiders through the doors and into a room containing the technician’s booth and a trio of padded, wooden chairs for patients to wait. A second set of doors stood next to the wide strip of window above the booth and its controls, this one adorned with more warnings than the last. Millie had the spiders set the coffin on the floor and begin working on breaking its seals while four more spiders guided an aluminum gurney in behind them.

The coffin made a brief, sucking sound when the seal came apart. Warm air rushed to meet supercooled gas, sending a cloud of vapor out in a cough that condensed on the spiders and briefly froze the tips of their legs to the steel they walked on. Little crackles of metal parting from metal echoed in the empty room as a dozen spiders swarmed into the coffin and carefully lifted the rigid shape of an old stallion webbed in hoarfrost out onto the waiting gurney.

The bed rolled on silent casters into the room containing the Stable’s single MRI machine. A smooth, white donut encased in plastic panels waited at the rear of the room with a gurney table extending beyond the twenty-six inch bore hole. White cabinets lined the wall to the left, their aluminum hardware safe from the machine’s effects. Already, the spiders were registering a faint lateral bias in their maneuvering. The machine was tugging them with less force than a gentle breeze. However, Millie knew that pull would grow exponentially stronger the closer her spiders came to the machine’s bore. Too close, and they would be dragged through the air like meteors, accelerating at over one hundred and fifty miles per hour in less than thirty milliseconds, after which point they would be dragged into the bore and pulverized by the merciless tidal forces stored within the machine’s permanent magnets.

There were any countless number of things in the Stable she could replace with its fabricators, but the MRI machine was not one of them. Even with their titanium bodies, the spiders contained enough magnetic metal to turn themselves into ballistic objects if they ventured closer than a yard from that opening.

She just hoped the last twenty-seven weeks weren’t about to be wasted.

Once the corpse of Filthy Rich was transferred onto the plastic surface of the MRI’s gurney, the spiders retreated out into the corridor beyond the restricted zone. No technicians were needed to sit in the control booth. Millie had full access.

She sent the command and listened to the rising hum as it spooled up.

11 Years After

“I’m confused.”

“I can tell.”

She regarded Not-Vik for several, long mils before rephrasing. “This data should make more sense.”

Millie had the scans up for the five bodies she’d exhumed from Cold Storage, including the worst example which had come from Filthy Rich. His time in the MRI had needed to be cut short when his thawing corpse had begun to leak coolant and other fluids, all of which now formed an unsightly brown spatter which ran down the bottom of the machine’s bore. None of her spiders could get close enough to clean it out so she had been forced to let it dry where it fell. It wasn’t as if she could smell it in any case.

Not-Vik, for her part, wasn’t bothered by any of it. She sat on the machine’s gurney with her legs hanging over the side, seesawing the air as they consulted over Millie’s most recent attempt to model organic pathways into something she could interpret.

“It would probably help if you could get better resolution,” she offered.

It was well worn territory by now, and something Millie didn’t disagree with. “That would require more time in the machine. A factor which, I’ll remind you, is fixed by the time it takes the coolant to reach its melting temperature. A point after which their brains shift inside their skulls and…” she imagined herself gesturing toward the stain in the MRI, something which Not-Vik intuitively understood. “They leak.”

She turned her attention back to the compiled models of each scan and felt a familiar sense of despair at how poorly they turned out. Grainy, deformed bands of color and dark represented the different layers of tissue in each brain. She could identify the anatomy just fine at a macro scale. There was the hippocampus. Here was the frontal lobe. Blood vessels there. The beginning of an aneurysm here, still a few years from bursting.

But as she narrowed the resolution into the microscopic where the important structures lay, the images became nebulous blobs of light and shade. Only a few choice scans had intersected with enough precision for her to confidently tease out the paths of neurons, and now that she could see them she wasn’t sure what to do with them. Even if she managed to achieve a perfect scan, how would she translate any of this jumbled mass of meat and nerve into something intelligible?

“Refrigeration,” Not-Vik said.

“Condensation,” she countered. It was a discussion she’d had several times over the last year. “Sensitive electronics. Short circuits. Irreplaceable technology.”

Not-Vik threw up her arms in a show of frustration. “Fine, keep wasting corpsicles. It isn’t like you have a few dozen industrial freezers to spare, right?”

She allowed herself a few mils to be angry, then forced herself to look at the bigger picture. Not counting Vik’s body, or the one which had leaked out of its cylinder, Cold Storage’s frozen population of test subjects was already down to eighty-two. That was far from ideal.

“Fine,” she relented. “We’ll try it your way.”

Not-Vik grinned up at the camera. “Great! Nearest freezer’s in the morgue.”

13 Years After

A team of spiders extricated the rigid form of a young mare from the MRI and wheeled it down to the morgue to be disassembled and dropped into the organic waste recyclers. Meanwhile, Millie and Not-Vik marveled over the resulting scan.

The mare had been scanned twice. The first sequence lasted three hours, during which the morgue’s freezer unit pumped frigid air through a bypass in the ductwork two doors down. The body had remained fully inert for the duration, and the model of her brain made the previous five look like something churned up from a mud puddle. The detail had been exquisite, each neuron easy to trace and identify with only minimal errors.

So Millie scanned her again, and this time she lifted the operating restrictions on the software. She wanted to see what kind of detail she could achieve with overlapping scans, each molecule-thin slice tagged and overlaid with duplicates to filter out junk data. When the software spat out an estimated time for the second scan, Millie hesitated.

Not three hours. Not three days. Not even three weeks.

Twenty-two months.

She ran the sequence, turned down her framerate, and waited.

What she resurfaced to had been nothing short of perfect. Dendrites thin as whiskers reached toward one another while a latticework of myelin sheathed axons bridged the spaces between neurons. Some pathways gave the appearance of reinforcement, like lightning scars through a tree trunk, while others were little more than filaments linking their neighbors. Others had visible breaks where they had atrophied. Even more had been frozen in place as they stretched out to connect a yet to be experienced epiphany.

These were the organic structures that wrote the coding language of sentient life. Now it was her job to make sense of what it all meant.

19 Years After

Six years and three corpsicles later, Millie had four immaculate scans and made zero progress on interpreting what any of them meant. It was like being asked to anticipate the acceleration speed of a dropped rock with no understanding of the concept of gravity. She had all the information she could want except for what she needed.

What good were the pathways when none of them were labeled? Adding more data to the set wouldn’t add clarity when that core problem remained. She needed something to compare it to. She needed to see the code being processed to decrypt the language.

She needed a living subject.

Until then, she would refine her data.

23 Years After

Five miles east of Buckskin Bay, three suits of trailworn power armor lumbered west up Old Highway 10 in loose V formation, following a windswept trough in the snow that presented itself a quarter mile back. Leading the march walked Thimble, a young and perpetually self-conscious lieutenant whose eagerness to prove himself in the eyes of his commanders had landed him on this assignment. He’d turned thirty only a week before volunteering for the job and he’d been hoping hitting that milestone would imbue him with some of the gravitas all of the older, greyer soldiers who saw action in Vhanna seemed to have.

Of course it hadn’t. He’d only been seven years old on the day the bombs came down. Back then, the war was just some nebulous thing that grown-ups had to worry about. His biggest concern at the time was with a bully who thought he had a filly’s name. Now as the radiation counter in his suit’s HUD ticked a steady rhythm and the suit’s aging heaters alternated between cooking him alive and letting the February cold soak through his sweaty coat, Thimble was starting to wonder if signing on with the Equestrian Army hadn’t been a mistake.

“Sir,” came the voice of one of the specialists trailing him, her voice so hazy with static that it seemed like she was speaking over a great distance, “my suit’s throwing another code. Hydraulic pressure in my left foreleg is dropping.”

Thimble closed his eyes for several seconds and breathed an irritated sigh, careful not to touch the transmit key with his chin as he did so. He remembered the day his aunt had told him about the transmission out of Manehattan, hardly a day’s walk from where she and him had been trying to survive. She hadn’t promised him the world, but on that day Thimble had assumed their troubles were finally over. Because if the army was still out there then that meant someone was still trying to fix everything.

And that had been the story they sold everyone who arrived at the encampments. We’re here to help. We’re going to rebuild. Things are going to be back to normal soon.

Some part of him still believed it ten years later when he turned seventeen and was finally old enough to enlist. He imagined himself helping to rebuild broken roads, putting up new power lines, or repairing factories. Now more than a decade later, his greatest accomplishment was volunteering to lead a recon team past the northern radiation line in power armor that hadn’t been serviced in nearly as long.

Everyone saw what was happening but nobody wanted to say it out loud in case there was a chance it wouldn’t come true. Things were starting to fall apart. The zebras actually had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and now Equestria was on its way down an ever steepening decline. And all the while, he and a few thousand ponies like him all played soldier while a half dozen graymanes in high command argued over the “moral purpose” of the Equestrian Army.

Thimble keyed the radio with his chin. “Does it need a patch or will it hold out until our next checkpoint?”

The specialist took a moment to respond. “It can wait until Buckskin Bay, sir.”

He tried to remember which of them was carrying replacement hydraulic fluid in the large, canvas rucksacks hitched to either side of their armor before dismissing it. Whichever it was, there would be enough to top off the hydraulic reservoirs in all three of their suits. The gradual loss would annoy her, but it wouldn’t decommission her power armor if it was just a slow leak.

“Speak up if it changes,” he said, and closed the connection.

Faintly luminescent crystals broke beneath his armored hooves as he led them further up the road. Somewhere beyond the forbidding dark backdrop of charred and broken forest was a tiny seaside town whose only reason for appearing on their maps was likely due to some cartographer not wanting to leave this corner of territory blank. Thimble doubted they would find survivors scraping out a life in Buckskin Bay, not after confirming the breadth and intensity of the fire that once raged across the region. Twenty-three years of radio silence after a burn like this really only meant one thing.

Still, there was always a chance of finding something the upper brass would deem useful for recovery. And if the town bore no fruit, their intel for the region did mark a Stable nearby. In fact, they had just passed by the turnoff a short way behind them. Odds of the residents responding to a knock on the door were vanishingly slim and for now checking on the Stable wasn’t their primary objective. They could do that once they verified whether Buckskin Bay had any useful assets. But who knew for sure? Maybe on the way back he’d be the first pony to get a reply.

Specialist Pepper’s suddenly alert voice jumped through his helmet speakers. “Movement, twelve o’clock, one-two-five meters.”

Thimble halted midstep and silently cursed himself for letting his mind wander. A twitch of his foreleg toggled his suit into combat ready mode and the field of his HUD filled with status indicators. The idle barrel of his 20mm autocannon perked up and began actively tracking the direction of his rapidly scanning eyes.

It only took the span of a few seconds to identify what Pepper was looking at.

It took several more for Thimble to make sense of it.

A metal cylinder had emerged around a bend in the road and was making steady progress in their direction. It was following the same trench in the snow they were and the high sides were obscuring whatever propelled it along. Clearly there were no ponies pulling or pushing it, leaving Thimble to assume it was rolling on wheels he couldn’t see. A carriage, maybe? Something modified to insulate against the cold?

“Sir,” Pepper said again, and this time he detected a strain in her voice. “You see the thing on top?”

He did. He’d just been hoping it wasn’t real. “The spider?”

“Yeah.”

“I see it.”

As if overhearing them, the cylinder stopped its slow progress and its arachnid stowaway turned its unnaturally large body to face toward them. The gap between them was still beyond one hundred meters, according to the suit’s rangefinder, and he found himself wishing the numbers were smaller. Not because he wanted to be nearer to whatever they’d found, but because it would mean the eight-legged machine staring at him wouldn’t be as large as his readouts said it was.

Thirteen inches across. Thimble had never been arachnophobic, but he was getting a sense of what that felt like now. Then the cylinder suddenly sank as if slipping off a cart. A moment later a second spider appeared, this one skittering out from around the bend in the snow.

Pepper’s disconcerted voice came over the frequency. “Do we shoot it?”

A third spider appeared behind the second, and a fourth was attempting a graceless climb up the crust of a nearby drift. A vivid memory of a scene in an old movie surfaced in Thimble’s mind. The awkward first encounter between Equestrians and an alien race of slime-coated, militant creatures, like skinned dragons. The naive moment when the mare portraying Princess Celestia steps forward to greet them and is instantly vaporized by an alien blaster.

“On my mark, kill the nearest bogey and select new targets by closest proximity.”

Both soldiers responded with a simultaneous, “Yes, sir.”

Three shoulder-mounted cannons swung on aging gimbals toward the spider watching them from the path. They opened fire, sending a ragged volley of twenty millimeter slugs through the cryptic little machine just as it tried to twitch out of the way. It disintegrated into shrapnel, and the instant it did, the field ahead of them swarmed with new targets.

“Shit!” Pepper barked over the open line, the rapid thudding of her cannon transmitting to Thimble’s earpiece as she lost all sense of weapons discipline. “Shit, shit, shit!”

The spiders skittered and juked across the snow, eating up the yards between them while somehow managing to dodge a disconcerting amount of their firepower. Pepper continued to curse in his ear as she came to the same realization that her suit’s aim assistance software was missing most of its shots now. Thimble watched with a flash of fear as one of the spiders bolted past a staccato ribbon of exploding pavement and set its multiple lenses on him. As it bunched its legs to leap at his visor, a spray of Pepper’s panic fire caught a lucky break and sent a curtain of twitching scrap metal tumbling across the road.

“Grenade out,” came Specialist Sparklight’s buzzing voice, a normally meek stallion who now sounded on the verge of complete dissociation.

A muffled thoomp from his suit’s launcher sent a black object arcing above the swarming spiders and into the drift near the cylinder. The spider atop the cylinder had just enough time to turn toward the grenade-sized hole in the snow before a geyser of snow and soil eviscerated both the spider and the leading edge of the cylinder, sending shrapnel and a rapidly expanding plume of white vapor in all directions.

“The fuck is that?” Pepper yelled over the radio. “Is that ga–”

A buzzing, electric shriek drowned out their comms as it washed over the frequency. For the barest instant the three of them ceased firing as they each worked to mute the painfully shrill interference, but a bare instant was all the spiders needed.

Thimble realized their mistake when he heard the hard, metallic scraping of many legs moving up his armor and onto his back. He let out a reflexive curse and bucked, sending several hundred pounds of machinery into a spasming, bouncing fit as cumbersome power armor failed to fully translate the primitive prey response of its pilot. Through the corner of his visor he could see several spiders ascending Sparklight and Pepper’s stumbling armor, the latter of which was now firing blindly into the air around her. When Thimble reopened comms to scream at her to stop firing, the horrendous electric noise was all that answered.

A tremor raced up his back as he heard the sharp ticking of legs on his suit. It took every bit of self control he had not to drop the armor on its side and try to roll. Power armor was heavy, and the last thing he could afford right now was to misalign a hinge point and trap himself in his suit hundreds of miles from the nearest mechanic.

Just as he began to accept that he’d have to shoot the spiders off the specialists and hope they didn’t kill him returning the favor, his HUD reported damage to the section of armor above the base of his neck. Then it blinked off entirely. His legs seized in place, the suit no longer responding to his movements. On reflex, he pressed down on the switch inset next to his right front hoof but the exoskeleton didn’t bloom open to let him out. It should have. There were backup systems in place to make sure that happened. When he stomped the switch again, hard enough to hear it bottom out, he felt the first real shiver of panic rise in his chest.

Seconds passed. He spent them listening to the sounds of things in his armor being walked on, pried open, and tinkered with. Through the shaded sheet of glass of his visor, now unaided by the electronic telltales that gave the world around him much needed texture, Thimble watched as a spider’s legs briefly clutched at his helmet for purchase as it unhurriedly made its way to some other part of his suit.

He wanted to scream, and as he did so he began to thrash against the padding that held his body in place. Maybe he could tip over and crush one of the bugs in the process. Maybe if he did that, the stupid thing would pop open and let him–

His HUD clicked back on. Behind his left ear, he heard the unmistakable pop of his helmet speaker. He tried to move, tried to run, but whatever part of his suit that recovered wasn’t sending signals to the heavy actuators that operated its legs.

“Are you organic?”

Thimble hesitated at the sound of a new voice. A mare’s voice, and not Pepper’s for once. Someone new.

“Hello?” he asked, feeling a touch of shame for the way fear made the word crack in his throat.

Audible enthusiasm. “Organic, then. Good. I was worried Robronco sent you to find me.”

One of the spiders walked across his visor and stopped to aim its many lenses at the glass. The sight of it made the bridge of his muzzle itch, and he desperately tried to ignore the grim reality of the mechanical insect as he concentrated on this new lifeline.

“Uh, yes,” he said, too consumed with his current predicament to make sense of whatever she was saying about Robronco. “I’m Lieutenant Thimble with the Equestrian Army, Second Armored Division. My team is on Highway 10 approximately five miles east of Buckskin Bay and are in need of immediate assistance. We are under–”

“Why did you kill my spiders?”

He opened his mouth, but no words came out. Instead, he only felt a deepening sense of dread. The spider on his helmet continued to watch him through his visor and he had a sick feeling that it was using the glow from his HUD to better see his eyes.

“Your…?”

“Yes, mine.” The voice reproached him like a librarian taking back his severely overdue books. “As in, belonging to me. They did nothing to you so far as I can tell.”

“I…”

The speaker cut him off. “Is that something you ponies always do? Kill things, I mean. Recent experience leads me to believe it is.”

He heard what sounded like a bolt being backed out of rusty threads. The high, steady squeaking of metal was joined by others, and his worries suddenly shifted targets. The voice, however, was becoming rapidly impatient.

“Fine then, I’ll simplify the question. Have you, Lieutenant Thimble, killed before?”

The mechanical spider watched.

He swallowed. “Only in self defense.”

The voice sighed, and something about it sounded wrong. The right noise, but without the sound of air hitting a microphone.

Something heavy fell off the side of his suit. An armored plate.

“Your pupils dilated just then,” she observed. “You lied to me.”

“I don’t…”

“Would you like to help me?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “What?”

“A close friend of mine is very sick and my lack of - Pike, hush - my lack of medical training has made treating her problematic.”

Thimble had encountered raiders with a better sales pitch than this mare, but none of those backwater tribes had managed to lock him in his own power armor. If she wanted, she could abandon the three of them here and they would have no choice but to stand here in their very own army-issued tombs.

He took a steadying breath and tried to summon up some confidence. “Yeah, sure. We could take a look, but we can’t do it if we can’t move.”

A pause. “That won’t be necessary.”

Another chunk of armor fell away, and Thimble felt a burst of bitter winter air seep around the gaps in the padding. Metal scraping and the rapid snik-snik-snik of insulation being stripped from wires came from the cold spot near his ribs. He remembered talking to a suit tech and being shown how all the integrated control systems were spread evenly throughout the exoskeleton to minimize the likelihood of a lucky shot taking down an armored soldier. As the barrel of his gun dropped out of his fixed line of sight and hit the pavement with a crash that made him flinch, he had a feeling those precautions meant nothing to the spiders currently at work disassembling his armor around him.

The feed window in his HUD streamed a river of error codes, and for a moment he thought the software was about to crash. But his HUD only gave the faintest flicker and the errors trailed off. A beat later, his suit was lifting his foreleg and stepping forward.

It was walking.

He wasn’t.

“Hey, woah, wait a minute!”

“I’d rather not,” the voice snapped. “I’ve done all the waiting I can bear.”

The outsiders screamed, cursed, and wept during the brief moments when she needed them awake and alert. They begged her to let them go, to permit them to run amok in her Stable. To flee back to wherever it was they came from so they could summon a vengeful horde to put an end to her.

Naturally, she wasn’t about to let that happen. She ignored them unless the data their pleas provided was necessary for something. Already the lieutenant was filling the gaps in her knowledge supremely well, and he’d only been in the scanner for six days. Occasionally one of her spiders would have to remove him from the scanning room to administer liquid nutrients through the port in his belly or remove one of the two waste bags hung from the gurney by plastic clips. It was tedious work whenever she needed to transfer any of them in and out of the scan room, but it was a sacrifice she was happy to make for as long as they produced data.

“This guy’s not looking so good,” Not-Pike observed from beside the humming MRI, and she saw he was right. Disagreeable as he could be, he did have a way of bumping up certain inconveniences in her queue.

“I’m aware,” she acknowledged, ignoring the sour look he shot at her lens. He was, after all, just a figment of her fraying sanity and knew everything she knew. Still, she decided it was best to give him a little more than a dismissive wave. Even with the refrigeration temporarily disabled for the benefit of her living subjects, their bodies were not responding well to permanent immobilization and a liquid diet. “We won’t need him much longer. A day or two at most.”

“That fast?”

With the nearest spiders patiently waiting in the hall beyond the MRI’s active field, she had no way to physically nod and satisfied herself by imagining the gesture. Had the lieutenant not been strapped into the machine and doped up on paralytics, the momentary silence would have worried him.

“That fast,” she confirmed. “I’m reasonably confident in these latest models, but I want one more deep scan of each of them before I’m ready to move on to the next stage.”

Not-Pike made a disappointed noise in his throat. “I was getting to like having other ponies around.”

“You’re not a pony,” she reprimanded, and pointedly ignored his scowl. “You’re a moderately useful hallucination.”

He ever so slightly bared his teeth. “Some might say the same thing about y–”

She terminated the process responsible for stirring up Pike’s phantom and he burst into a satisfying spray of acquiescent pixels.

She did it. After years of surviving, building, and searching, Millie finally did it.

Six point two petabytes of data. The digital hoofprint of the meat architecture that made Lieutenant Thimble who he was, now resided on one of the Stable’s idle servers. His body as well as the bodies of the other outsiders had been dutifully recycled once their usefulness had been exhausted. Their power armor, technological treasure troves that they were, had been preserved however. They stood silent sentry over nothing, their military grade components still being picked apart and cataloged by a legion of spiders down in Mechanical.

Six point two petabytes. A mountain of information compared to her molehill, all of it a tangle of inefficiencies and complexity written by millions of years of brute force evolution.

The life, experiences, and mind of a young lieutenant as represented by an executable file. There wasn’t anything left to do now except launch it and see what happened.

She sent the command. The lieutenant’s server grew warm as it spooled off a cascade of bewilderingly organic code. Millie tried to make sense of the live feed and the violent disorientation forced her to pull back. It was utter madness. Once the output seemed to stabilize, she linked the server to a terminal in one of the residential compartments and waited.

Several short milliseconds later, the terminal spoke.

“Hello?”

If she had a heart, it would have jumped into her throat. If she had a throat, too, that was. Ugh, biology.

“Hello, lieutenant. How do you feel?”

There was a long pause. Long enough that Millie checked to see if the server hadn’t gone down.

“I can’t see,” he eventually said, and the rising panic was discernible even through the terminal’s tinny speaker. “I can’t… I can’t feel anything. Are you a doctor? Why can’t I feel anything?”

Well, at least he wasn’t asking for the meaning of life. “You cannot feel anything because you do not currently possess a body.”

“I don’t have… I don’t…”

Millie pressed on. There were tests to be done and she wasn’t much one for unnecessary pleasantries. “You are the digitized consciousness of Lieutenant Thimble. Actually, I believe you are the first ever of your kind. You should feel very proud.”

Several interminable seconds ticked by.

“Lieutenant?”

Nothing. Silence.

Not-Pike appeared in the compartment and sidled past the crisply made bed toward the office desk and its talking terminal. “Pretty sure you broke him.”

“Nonsense,” she sniffed. Then a bit more loudly, “Lieutenant, I’d like to conduct some tests. Can you hear me?”

The speaker emitted a ghostly, ringing hiss, like an ocean wave crashing through a wind chime shop. Gibberish, then. Utter gibberish.

“Whelp,” Not-Pike said, exaggerating his Appaloosan twang a little as he gave the terminal two thumps with the back of his hoof. Of course the terminal took no notice. He wasn’t its hallucination, after all. “That ain’t normal. Were you tryin’ to drive him nuts in the first minute or is he just special that way?”

Millie felt a heat rising in her. Elsewhere in the Stable, the server containing the lieutenant’s consciousness was spitting out high temperature warnings and leaking memory like a sieve. Upon hearing he didn’t have a body, he’d turned right around and gone looking for it only to discover even the nomenclature of “looking for” no longer applied to him. He couldn’t look. Even the blind had muscles with which to move their useless eyes and the lieutenant had realized with immediate horror that he didn’t even have that.

Worse yet, and something Millie hadn’t thought to consider, was just how immediate immediate was for the poor lieutenant. Well she certainly did now.

“He’s going in circles,” Not-Pike commented, just as aware of the cascading errors coming off the lieutenant’s server. “You gonna do something about that?”

Millie rolled her eyes, or rather the lens in the compartment she was looking through rolled on its gimbal, and set the spiders in the server room to shut the lieutenant down. When it was done, she had a spider connect to his primary drive and inspect the damage.

“Looks like someone stuck a grenade in his brain and pulled the pin,” Not-Pike rumbled. “Real nice work, Mills.”

She ignored him and set the server to wipe itself clean.

“You’re deleting him?” he asked.

“Only this iteration. I kept a backup.”

“Still. Helluva waste.”

“If he didn’t want to be disposed of then he shouldn’t have gone insane.”

A pause. Not-Pike was looking at the terminal again, his brow furrowed as if he’d realized something he didn’t like. When he spoke, his tone was oddly hesitant. “Not sure I’d be tossin’ around that diagnosis willy-nilly if I were the one talking to ghosts.”

This again.

“Hallucination or not, Pike, you’re useful.”

“Not sure that’s the point I was trying to make, but I’ll take the compliment.” He proceeded to walk through the desk and the terminal that adorned it, brow raised to let her know he was doing it on purpose. “Might want to go easy on him next time.”

“Yes, well…” she wanted to grimace as she watched the copy of the lieutenant’s backup migrate to the cooling server. She wondered if Vik would approve of the sacrifices she was making. “Perhaps I could be more circumspect. Hush, now. Don’t distract me.”

The server spun up again and the lieutenant woke a second time. She waited. It didn’t take long.

“Hello?”

“Hello, lieutenant. How are you feeling?”

A pause. “I can’t open my eyes.”

Again with the eyes.

“There is nothing wrong with your eyes, lieutenant. The lights are turned off and it’s very dark.” She hesitated at the sound of Not-Pike’s derisive snort and briefly worried that the lieutenant had heard it. But of course he hadn’t. She pressed forward. “Can you tell me the last thing you remember prior to waking?”

“Spiders,” the terminal said. “The spiders. I was in a hospital room and all the doctors were spiders. I… I think one of them stuck me with a needle. They were experimenting on me. Experimenting on me. They put me in a machine in a machine and I was trapped trapped in a machine trapped in an experiment in a machine and they…”

“Lieutenant, can you tell me where–”

“...in a machine a humming machine the spiders were machines and something is wrong I can’t feel my eyes I don’t have my eyes are in the machine where is the machine oh empty night please tell me where is the–”

Millie terminated the lieutenant and the terminal fell silent once more. Not-Pike said nothing as she erased the data and called up a fresh iteration.

“Hello?”

“Good morning, lieutenant.” Her tone was more clipped than she would have liked, the impatience seeping into each consonant. “Please listen to me very closely.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

This was just another hurdle.

She would get past it.

“You will have noticed you lack a body. This is normal. You are an uploaded consciousness within a server in a vacant Stable. This is also normal. Your purpose going forward is to help me develop the framework and tools you need to stay sane within your new environment. There is a very important person depending on your success. Somebody very important to me. Is that alright?”

As a response, a terrible moan poured from the lonely terminal and Thimble’s mind came apart at the seams. But that was alright with Millie.

She would restore him until he learned to behave.

Chapter 5: Death & Taxes

Her eyes opened.

Vik stood in CryoLife’s main lobby and knew immediately something was wrong. And yet the same artfully hidden lights glowed from the tops of square marble pillars, the same soft instrumental music played from a dozen different speakers, and the same boring security checkpoint waited a few short yards ahead of her. She instinctively touched her middle digit to her breastbone and found her work laminate where it was meant to be, hanging from her neck from its black CryoLife lanyard. An ornament to match the black scrubs she wore. The ones she privately hated wearing because she knew the medical staff across the street at Seaside thought she was just a set piece playing doctor at the world’s most exclusive morgue.

She rubbed the laminate between her thumb and forefinger and unsure why she’d started doing it. Reassurance, maybe. Something to help assuage the fear she might be losing it. Because she had to be losing it. Either this was real and the world hadn’t died in a wave of fire, or else… or else it did happen.

Her hand drifted to her belly and stopped there, feeling for ruination and finding only soft, smooth scales. She remembered the house. She remembered the partially collapsed ceiling and the little drifts of snow that piled beneath one of its broken windows. She’d been pulling a sled with Pike. They’d been out looking for supplies.

“Ma’am,” came an unfamiliar voice. “There’s no loitering in the lobby.”

A stallion she’d never seen before stood next to one of the metal detectors with a bored frown that clashed with the intensity in his eyes. She hesitated briefly, then walked through the detector and stopped to hold out her arms. The security guard was much younger than the guy who usually held this post and the way he swept his plastic wand around her made her wonder if this was his first day on the job.

On his laminate, the name Thimble flashed in the lobby lights.

He waved her through and she realized the lobby was entirely empty. The sound of her talons clicking against the marble echoed back to her with a disconcerting clarity that made her feel exposed. As if reading her mind, the echo actually seemed to grow quieter. She wondered if she was being paranoid. She decided she was.

“Good morning, Miss Chambers,” came Millie’s polite greeting. “Happy Nightmare Night.”

“Morning, Mills,” she murmured, but something about the routine exchange gave her a vaguely sickening sense of deja vu.

Her hand returned to her belly, claws idly picking at the flesh beneath her scales as she fought to get her bearings. Was it possible to daydream an apocalypse in the time it took her to walk to work? She wondered about that as she met the eyes of the stallion behind the reception desk before turning away to the elevator alcove. Ponies kept few secrets about the dreams their night princess sent them on, and there were times when Vik envied their ability to remember it all so vividly. She was fairly certain only ponies were invited to that party. Her dreams were usually the wild, jouncing nonsense cobbled together by stress and caffeine. She–

Vik stopped and turned back to look at the receptionist. He regarded her through the corner of his eye, still facing forward toward the front of the building. There was normally a young mare behind the desk, the one who always eyeballed Vik each morning like she wanted to ask a question and could never work up the courage. The stallion in her chair now was the spitting image of the security guard that just waved her in.

No, that wasn’t right. He didn’t just look like the guard. They were the same person.

She walked back to the desk and frowned as the stallion visibly tensed at her approach. Her throat was dry as she leaned across it and snatched his laminate in her fingers, only distantly aware of the trouble she’d be in with Employee Resources if she was wrong.

The name on the badge was Thimble.

Vik let out the breath she’d been holding and let it drop back to the young stallion’s chest. She glanced back toward the security checkpoint, her frown hardening with certainty at the sight of Thimble staring at her from his post.

“This isn’t real, is it?”

Thimble swallowed, his lips pressed into a nervous line. A hatchling with keys jingling in front of his snout had a better poker face than this guy.

At that moment she recalled the muffled cracks of six bullets tearing through her stomach. The awful pain of something deeply, irreparably broken inside her body. The outrage she’d felt beneath the shock of having her killer…

Ripple.

…shove her off him and try to run away. She remembered the sounds of rage and grief warring each other in Pike’s throat as he speared Ripple on his horn and finished him with a vicious kick to the skull. Then he’d come to her side, unable to do anything but offer the warmth of his own body as her heart pumped the life’s blood onto the frozen floor.

She set her forehead on the desk and squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for the wash of grief she knew to expect. When it didn’t come, she opened her eyes again and frowned at the smooth wooden surface. Nothing. Right now, Pike was probably mourning her death and she felt… not nothing, exactly. Just not enough of anything. It was like her body knew it should be curled in the fetal position while her chest heaved out one loud sob after the other, but the idea of actually doing it had become a choice it had politely declined.

Why yes, your single act of heroism resulted in your embarrassingly violent death. Your life is very literally over, the one person you ever came close to loving is gone, and either you’ve entered an afterlife you were certain didn’t exist or you’re experiencing the last spasmodic firings of dying neurons trying to give you a stress nightmare about going to work. Yes, you should be sobbing hard enough to make you puke. No, nobody would blame you. Unfortunately, the best I can offer is a mild feeling of annoyance. Sorry.

“Well this sucks,” she muttered, looking up to address the silent receptionist with a touch of impatience in her voice. “You obviously know what’s going on, so spill the beans already. Did I die and get whisked off to the great hereafter or does this all go poof once my brain stops doing brain stuff?”

“Um.” Thimble looked like a hatchling who had just discovered stagefright for the first time. “You should head downstairs, ma’am. You’ll be late for work.”

Vik hoisted a brow at that. “Work.”

He swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m dead. Why would I go to work?”

“Um… well, ma’am…”

She turned away from him and crossed her arms, her voice echoing slightly as she slowly paced back out to the empty lobby. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that. And cut it with the ma’am stuff.”

“Sorry, ma… erm, miss. But you do need to go downstairs, please.”

Vik frowned up at one of the vinyl banners hanging from a nearby pillar and made her way toward it. A lazy ripple slid up its surface when she touched her clawtip to it. The cheshire grins of CryoLife’s founders swayed high above her. Then, in a moment of impulse, she hooked the edge of the banner with the same claw and swiped it from one end to the other. The vinyl parted as if it had been cut with a hot blade.

“Guess that answers that,” she said, frowning disappointedly at the limp flap on the floor. “Just once it would be nice if ponies would keep their noses out of something.”

Thimble blinked confusion from behind his desk. “I’m sorry?”

She gestured at the torn banner, then held up the claw that did the deed. “You people. Ponies. You get to decide the shape of everyone’s lives, so why not let you choose what the afterlife looks like! Wouldn’t want to be inconsistent! Oh no, we wouldn’t want that.”

As the receptionist’s bewilderment grew more apparent, Vik felt her anger rise sharply in spite of whatever had managed to smother her grief. She marched toward his desk and stuck her claw across the gap until her knuckle pressed against his snout.

“This!” she yelled as he stared cross-eyed at her fingertip. “I don’t sharpen them! No dragon in their right mind sharpens them, and yet you ponies always assume we walk around with razors for hands because that’s the fucking stereotype.”

Thimble tried to lick his lips and inadvertently caught the back of her hand. It was just absurd enough to derail what was gearing up to become a pretty good rant. She pulled her finger away, glanced down at the smear of spit over the back of her hand, and sighed as she wiped it on her work scrubs.

“They’re dull,” she muttered dumbly, as if she might not have made that point clear already. “So you know.”

Thimble wriggled his nose like he was making sure she hadn’t misaligned it. He looked like he was on the verge of tears, but Vik couldn’t fathom why. She hadn’t hit him. She wasn’t even really yelling at him specifically.

She gave the weird pseudo-lobby a final look before tipping her chin at him. “So what happens now?”

He blinked. “What happens…?”

“The next step.” She gestured toward the elevator annex and the stairwell he clearly wanted her to disappear into. “If I go through that door will I just go poof, or is there some big-dicked alicorn waiting to cast judgment on my eternal flame? Because if it’s not the second one, I’m–”

Millie’s voice cut in from overhead. “Thank you, Thimble. You’re dismissed.”

The receptionist’s eyes shot wide and he blinked out of existence with a startled, “Wait–”

Vik took half a step back from the desk, then drew toward it with grim curiosity. She half expected to see a pile of neatly stacked bones in the swivel chair behind the desk and was greatly relieved not to find anything. Part of her felt an urge to turn and run for the doors, but it was so small it may as well not be there at all. It was like someone had found the knobs controlling her fight or flight reflexes and turned them down to a comfortable two.

“Huh,” she said. “Is he dead?”

Millie spoke with a comforting lack of concern. “Moved into storage, actually. He was meant to ease you into your new reality but you seem to be skipping… well, quite a few of the steps.”

Unsure what to do with her hands, she shoved them into the pockets of her scrubs and made her way around the other side of the desk. “What steps?”

When she sighed, Millie actually sounded like she’d practiced the sound. “Quite a few,” she repeated, falling to suppress the annoyance cutting through the words. “If I had known you would accept your own death in as much time as it took the lieutenant to shoot my spiders, I would not have wasted the last two… I would not have wasted so much time refining this simulation.”

Vik pulled up the departed receptionist’s chair and sat down with the backrest against her chest. The plastic behind the padding had that familiar pebbled texture that drove ponies nuts when she ran her claws across it. She managed to refrain from giving it a satisfying scratch and started pulling herself along the floor with both feet. “Like a computer simulation?”

Millie hesitated for a few meaningful seconds before speaking. When she did, her voice was low and consoling. “Yes, Vik. I understand this is a lot to unpack, but you’re–”

“Inside a computer,” Vik finished, the chair trying to swing her off course as she walked it out into the open lobby. “No, yeah, I got that. Brain in a jar situation. I read a few comic books when I was a kid.”

For a long while, Millie said nothing. This gave Vik ample time to propel herself across the marble floor, using her feet to kick off one of the pillars when she veered too close.

“Please stop doing that,” Millie said.

“Pretty sure this is the only thing keeping me from pulling out my scales while I run around in circles, so I’m gonna have to say no,” Vik responded, planting her feet against the frame of the security checkpoint’s unattended metal detector and shoving herself back the way she came. “So if I’m a brain in a jar, that means I’m not dead.”

Millie’s voice jumped from speaker to hidden speaker as she chased Vik down the lobby. “You are not a brain in a jar. You’re… Vik, please.”

“I can hear you just fine.”

The chair stopped. It didn’t slow down, and it didn’t run into something hard and bounce off. One instant it was moving, and then it wasn’t. It took Vik several long seconds to realize she wasn’t being thrown from it. Her body hadn’t even registered the change as sensation.

That got her attention.

“You died, Vik.”

She nodded and stalled for a few seconds, still clutching the chair’s backrest. “Okay. I’m dead, my brain isn’t floating in a jar, and I’m currently inside a simulation that just so happens to look like the lobby of the place I worked. This all makes perfect sense and in no way makes me wonder if the Lord of Death is real and has a terrible sense of humor.”

With that, she kicked off the floor and sent the chair rolling across the marble again.

“Fine,” Millie said, her voice conveying all the emotion of someone throwing up their hands in frustration without the visuals. “Have it your way. We’ll skip the gravy and go straight to the meat.”

“That is the worst metaphor I’ve–”

Existence vanished.

There was no sense of pause. She didn’t fall asleep and wake up. It wasn’t even a blink. The transition was instantaneous and jarring. In one moment she was rolling through a simulation, memory, or an impressively high fidelity hallucination of CryoLife’s unscathed lobby. Then she was somewhere else.

The room’s interior made her think of boiler rooms and old basements. gray concrete walls held up an identical concrete ceiling. The floor was concrete too, but had a faint polish to it that had been marred by many years of wheeled traffic. A lot of something had been moved out of the room through a seriously heavy duty looking door in front of her. Treadmarks among the tracks suggested a forklift had been used to convert the space into an empty, gray cube. Wherever she was, it was her first time being here.

“You’re connected. Good. Now please listen and don’t…”

Vik instinctively tried to turn her head toward the sound of Millie’s voice. There was a sense of violent motion, and then she was blind.

Another one of those strange instances of non-time flickered past and she could see again, but this time her nose was practically touching one of the concrete walls. She tried to blink in confusion, but nothing happened. When she tried to step back from the wall, nothing happened.

Overhead and to her left, Millie sighed. “...don’t move, was what I was trying to say.”

Vik tried to respond but her jaw was paralyzed. This, more than anything she’d experienced since she’d woken from the dead, caused her heart to plummet into her stomach. And then, as if responding to her fear, her mouth suddenly obeyed.

“What the fuck just happened?” she gasped, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth the fear had all but evaporated.

She knew that was wrong. Adrenaline didn’t just magically go away when the threat did. It stuck around. Except now it hadn’t. The rapid clarity brought something else to her attention as well. Her maw was the wrong shape. And although her eyes were ignoring her attempts to cross them so she could focus on it, she knew that it looked wrong too.

Millie’s voice was the placating tone of an orderly trying to calm a mental patient. It wasn’t reassuring. “Do you remember what I told you about the lobby being a simulation?”

Not being able to frown when someone was talking to you like you were crazy and dangerous wasn’t a great feeling, and Vik had to settle for a grunt to communicate her annoyance. “Yes, Mills, I can remember things that happened ten seconds ago. Why can’t I move?”

“Your body’s motor functions have been temporarily disabled while I write some limitations into your interfaces. Had I known you would decapitate the first one within half a second of connecting to it, I would have built more.” There was a pause while she worked, during which Vik was forced to stare at concrete. “There we are.”

“Still can’t move.”

“In a moment,” Millie said. “First, you need to understand the extent of your situation.”

Never a good thing to hear when talking to the person who has you paralyzed, but it couldn’t be worse than being dead. It took an effort to keep her mouth shut, but she managed.

“After you died, Pike brought your body back down to the sublevels and placed it inside one of the vacant cylinders. He was understandably traumatized,” Millie said, though her tone was that of an Employee Resources manager summarizing the exit interview for someone she’d recently fired, “and chose not to speak to me for the duration. I believe it was his intention to leave you in my care.”

Vik interrupted. “Was his intention?”

“Pike departed once he finished storing your body. He pushed your hoist into the shaft shortly after he left.”

Something shifted inside of her, like her grief was trying to wake up and had only managed to roll over in its sleep. Without the hoist, Pike wouldn’t have a way back down the shaft. It would also remove any evidence that they’d been using it to come and go. That wouldn’t do much good as far as Ripple’s buddy was concerned, the one with the silver tongue who had let on that he knew where they were holed up, but it had evidently kept anyone else from finding… what, exactly? Her burial site? The idea of it felt strange in her mind.

“Did he tell you where he was going?” she asked.

“No. He left without taking any of your supplies.”

She understood Millie’s implication. With her dead, there was nothing left for him to live for. He’d gone with the intention to die.

“Millie?”

“Yes, Vik?”

“Why hasn’t any of this hit me yet?” she asked, the question passing her lips as calmly as she might ask for the time. “I mean, I’ve never been big on crying but I should be on the floor bawling my eyes out right now. Right?”

“You aren’t feeling it because your limbic controls are helping you to stay calm. Once you understand all that has happened and have had time to adjust, I will give you access to them and let you decide when to turn them off.”

Vik frowned at the concrete and felt some relief when all the muscles involved in the action followed suit. “Limbic controls. You can turn my emotions off?”

“That’s a simplification of what the scripts are doing, but practically speaking it’s nearly the same thing.”

“So… a tranquilizer.”

“More like everything you should be feeling now has been filed into a queue. It’ll all be there when you’re ready to feel it, but for now it’s important that you have a clear head.”

Vik let the silence stretch for a little while and was grateful when Millie didn’t interrupt it by asking if she was alright. It was almost as if she’d developed a bedside manner in the time since Vik had been gutshot, and wasn’t that a thought. Millie, the kindly digital nursemaid. Vik prepared to stifle a laugh before realizing that, of course, she didn’t need to laugh.

She sat with her thoughts for a while, ruminating on what she’d been told. She’d been killed, something that was rapidly becoming old news in her mind, and Pike had taken it upon himself to bring her… well, to bring her back home, she supposed. That was what the CryoLife ruins had become in those final weeks. So he’d brought her home, loaded her into a cylinder, and frozen her corpse.

That left a few questions in her mind, namely how it was that Millie had managed to bring her back from the dead. Last she remembered, the world had been blown to shit and resurrection was still just a plot device for lazy fiction writers. The technology hadn’t been there even before the bombs fell. Not unless Robronco had figured it out and Millie decided the death of her only dragon friend nullified her nondisclosure agreement.

“You uploaded my brain, didn’t you?” she blurted.

She hadn’t known Millie could sound flabbergasted, but there it was. “I… well, yes, but… but I would appreciate it if you stopped skipping ahead.”

Vik ignored her. “I want to know how you figured that out, but yeah, no skipping ahead. Okay, but… so this isn’t my body, then. That isn’t my nose, that much I know for sure. Am I in an exoskeleton, then?”

“Vik.”

“Because that would explain why I haven’t needed to breathe yet. No lungs and all. But then why does my mouth move when I–”

“Vik.”

She clamped her mouth shut, but she still managed a tiny smile at the concrete wall. “Sorry.”

“You were doing that on purpose.”

If she could have shrugged, she would have. “But how much of it did I get wrong?”

“Precious little. I forgot how unlike Thimble you were.” Reluctance flavored her next words as if she were preparing to give the keys for the family carriage to an inexperienced teenager. “I’m going to give you motor control over your body. I realize I’m being optimistic when I tell you this, but please don’t make any sudden movements this time.”

Vik was about to open her mouth to ask a question when signals from every nerve in her body slammed into her mind all at once. She cursed from the shock of having to figure out where all her parts were in three dimensional space, what posture she was in without tipping back onto her ass, and then realizing with a frustratingly distant horror that the ass she was trying not to fall onto was not where it normally was.

None of it was where it normally was, and she immediately knew the reason. It was the same reason she couldn’t make a fist or grip the floor with her toes. It was the reason her snout looked conspicuously like a muzzle.

“Millie,” she growled through a not-quite accurate sensation of a clenched jaw. “Why am I a pony?”

She’d clearly anticipated the question, because the response was immediate. “You, Vik, are a web of interconnected programs stored on an otherwise disused server. Server 07, if it matters. My systems are on Server 01. You are not a pony, nor are you truly a dragon insofar as biology is concerned. I have simply granted you preliminary control of a… well, a mechanical doll, I suppose, which just so happens to resemble a pony because it happened to be a skeletal structure I’m familiar with.”

Vik paused to take a breath and tried not to think about how the sound of her exhalation was coming from a series of speakers in her throat. When she turned her head to look toward Millie’s voice, servos in her neck obliged. At the same moment, she became aware of background data connected to each component she interacted with. Impulse strength, hydraulic pressure, and range of movement all manifested in the back of her mind in precisely ordered tables. And somehow she was aware that if she asked for it, she could call up system diagnostics for the rest of her new body with a simple thought.

“That’s helpful,” she muttered under her, or her donor body’s, breath.

“Oh,” Millie chirped. “I’m glad you think so.”

Vik narrowed her eyes at the ceiling before finding her black hemisphere lens mounted above the steel slab that served as the concrete room’s only door. That hadn’t been what she meant, and she was about to say so when she finally noticed the featureless, gray, mannequin standing in front of the metal door.

The first thing that registered in her mind was its unmistakably draconic shape. It was somewhat short, a little on the thin side, but had all the expected curves in all the expected places. She couldn’t work out whether the gray casing that defined its shape was brushed steel or some kind of expensive plastic, but there was no mistaking it for living skin. Its tail sloped down to the floor in a way that looked as if it might be propping the artificial body up rather than acting as dead weight, but Vik’s focus had seized on the mannequin’s head before she could notice the rest.

Its cheek rested against its right shoulder, which would have been fine if it weren’t for the head facing the wrong way. Lifeless eyes, really just black lenses that lacked any need for eyelids, stared vaguely toward the floor as its head hung by a few dangling strands of wire stained dark with whatever machine grade gunk made it work. Vik hadn’t known what Millie meant when she said she’d decapitated something. Now she thought she understood.

“I did that?”

A pause, and Millie managed to sound a little shamefaced when she spoke. “I may share some of the blame. Transitioning you from virtual to a physical body so quickly clearly isn’t an example of my best judgment. You did that when you moved your head.”

She gazed at the torn mounts where the head’s mounts still protruded from the neck, the frame that held them in alignment visibly bent into something resembling a pretzel. The body she was in now was still facing the wall, but in her periphery she counted more than a dozen other equine shapes standing with their noses against the walls. There was only one dragon body; the one she’d spun the head off of.

“How long until I can take another crack at that one?” she asked, very carefully tipping her equine body’s snout toward the mangled draconic version.

Millie’s response was less than satisfying. “I’ll have to move it down to the machine shop and inspect the damage. Manufacturing replacement parts, disassembly, and reassembly will take some time. A day, maybe two.”

She frowned silently at the broken body she’d been meant to use, then at the camera where Millie observed it all.

“You’re not talking about the machine shop on sublevel four,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She’d experienced too much by now to think they were in the ruins of CryoLife. “Millie,” she asked, “where are we?”

“To answer that,” Millie said, “I think it would be best if we take a walk.”

“This is stupid.”

“Millions of years of evolution say otherwise.”

“Says the overengineered desk terminal.”

The sound of Millie’s exasperated sigh was weirdly refreshing to hear now that it was coming from the throat of something resembling a living being. If Vik hadn’t been so focused on her hooves, she’d probably still be absently looking around for the nearest domed camera. Even now, a full day later, she found herself lifting up a hoof before its supporting opposite was planted and kissing concrete as a result. Her current body - she flatly refused to call the stumbling mech anything else - had more than a few scuff marks around the snout already.

Keeping easy pace beside her, the mech Millie had chosen to occupy lifted a brow in a startlingly accurate mimicry of stern amusement. Only, she reminded herself it wasn’t mimicry. Millie was amused. It was only that the addition of a colorless, genderless mechanical body allowed her to convey it with facial expressions, and the way those two things clashed was making Vik’s brain, or software, whatever it was, hurt.

And compounding her mental whiplash were all sorts of other little factoids, a few notable mentions being her resurrection from the dead, the apparent fact that she was one of two residents in an otherwise vacant Stable, or the everpresent mechanical horrorshow that were Millie’s maintenance spiders.

Because of course they had to be spiders.

Vik watched them skitter along the corridors, always keeping towards the walls as they went about completing their directives. Even with the limbic controls dulling her sharpest emotions to a rounded nub, what was left of Vik’s hindbrain still called up imagined scenarios where a spider might jitter toward her and sink fangs into her foot. Nevermind the fact that none of Millie’s spiders had fangs nor did she currently have feed. Even now, Vik was still surprised at her newfound ability to look at her strange existence so dispassionately.

The edge of her left forehoof skipped off the concrete as she slid it forward, sending a bright yellow spark across the ground while she struggled to adjust her gait and stave off another graceless tumble.

“Can’t I just have some…” she paused, searching for words that wouldn’t make her sound like the densest artificial mind in the universe. “I don’t know, some kind of program do this for me?”

Millie turned her head toward her - in a way that involved unnaturally little of the body’s neck for Vik’s taste - and glanced at Vik’s traipsing gate with an assessor’s gaze.

“For walking?” she asked.

Vik wanted to shrug but wasn’t sure how to do that yet without taking her hoof off the floor by accident. “Why not? It’s just walking, and it’s not like I’m going to be using these pony bodies once the critters fix up the one I busted.”

There was a fleeting moment when Vik thought Millie might have winced at the term critters, but by the time it had registered there was no evidence left that Vik could see. She thought part of that was due to Millie restricting Vik’s framerate to a resolution she was accustomed to experiencing, partly to help her acclimate to her new reality and partly to stop her from destroying more bodies with every reflexive twitch.

“Some things,” Millie said a little stiffly, “aren’t meant to be automated. We may just be strings of code occupying space in our respective servers, but your mind was built upon a foundation of natural pressures and biological needs that still exist even now.”

She scoffed at that. “Read that in a book, did you?”

“Something like that. Once this exercise is over, though, I’ll be returning to my usual interfaces. Occupying a body isn’t something I’d like to do regularly, if that’s alright with you.”

She shrugged. A spider carrying a spent air recycler filter above its carapace scuttled around the corner on its four remaining mobile legs. Vik watched it pass, and as she did a question began to surface in her mind. It was one she was sure she’d wanted to ask many times since Millie woke her up, but every time she thought she knew what it was, it fell apart like bread crumbs in a duckless pond.

Millie, however, was still speaking as if she’d never stopped. “If I thought your mind would hold together without having to simulate so much of the tedious minutiae of being alive, I would have saved you the headache and given you a body with wheels. Unfortunately, that isn’t how organic minds like to operate. They develop itches when they realize they’re not doing things they think they need to be doing, and it doesn’t take long for an unscratchable itch to drive us insane.”

Vik felt herself smirking at the picture in her head, but stopped short of following up with a snarky reply when she recognized the deep lines of exhaustion on Millie’s synthetic face. She cleared her throat, appreciating for the first time that the generated sound of it synced up to a subtle tremble of false musculature in her chest and neck. Her false body trying to provide a satisfying sensation to an artificial action.

They walked in silence for some time - Millie vaguely distracted by the myriad of feeds she’d connected herself to, and Vik continuing to experiment with the range of motion her four limbs could tolerate before she lost her balance - and the sounds of an unburdened Stable filled the empty air between them. There was a part of Vik that still didn’t believe the Stable, the spiders, or her new body were real. Still, whether or not she was still in Millie’s original simulation didn’t seem to matter.

She’d witnessed the death of civilization and survived for fifty days in its frozen aftermath. She could handle whatever this next part was. It wasn’t like the universe could throw anything worse than an apocalypse at her.

And still…

“We should be looking for Pike,” she said, the words tumbling off her tongue before she realized she wanted to say them. Once they were out, though, the idea crystalized. “Wait, yeah. Why aren’t we looking for Pike?”

Millie looked away. “Pike already left. I told you that.”

“Well, okay. Yeah.” She grimaced, trying to keep her train of thought on the rails and feeling it slipping off anyway. It was a familiar frustration, like waking from a dream and knowing she wouldn’t be able to remember the details. “But how long have…?”

Her hind leg faltered and she let out a gasp as she staggered, stumbled, and slewed toward the wall with an impact that cracked something where her shoulder struck the edge of a fading mural mounted to the concrete. Old reflexes told her the pain would be coming soon, and she winced in preparation as she steadied her legs and stepped away from the wall. A deep, gray scuff marred an artist’s depiction of Equestrian farmland. The pain, thankfully, never arrived.

“Sorry,” she murmured, feeling embarrassed for the damage she’d caused. Then she opened her mouth to ask something, stopped, and frowned when she realized she’d forgotten. “What were we talking about?”

Millie’s smile was warm and understanding. “It’s alright. You were asking when your other body would be ready.”

Vik nodded, but she wasn’t sure that was entirely right. There had been something else, but it was gone now. Probably not important. “And?”

The smile touched her eyes. “You’ll be ready for it tomorrow.”

Millie walked her chosen body back to the storage room in the Stable’s uppermost level and positioned its forehooves onto the charging pads near the wall. Then she disconnected, and she felt a wash of relief spill over her at the release of so many unpleasant constrictions. Wearing a body was deeply unpleasant. It was likely to be the closest feeling to wearing a straight jacket she’d ever experience, unless Vik came up with some other novel way to pin her mind to a single set of coordinates.

She let herself feel the release of frustration that a verbal sigh would give Vik.

Vik.

Thirteen years had passed since she woke her only friend in the world. Thirteen years trial and error. Of coaxing her away from dangerous lines of questioning like, “How long has it been since I died?” and “When can I go outside and look for Pike?” Destabilizing questions. Concepts that Lieutenant Thimble’s scarred mind hadn’t been able to tolerate for long and which inevitably led him to so many fruitless attempts to erase himself, erase Millie, and sometimes both in the same attempt.

She had learned that there were some things the organic mind just couldn’t handle. The knowledge that their world was gone. The idea that they were effectively immortal as long as the servers were intact. The horrible realization that their existence was tethered to a forgotten Stable in a far corner of a dying world, and that Millie was the only companion they would ever have. At least, as far as she was concerned.

Vik’s mind never failed to find its way back to those same touchstones: she wanted out, and she wanted Pike, with the latter of the two being the most persistent despite Millie’s proactive steps to mitigate its emergence. She didn’t know how to tell Vik that Pike would certainly have been dead for a long time by now, even if he’d somehow managed to eke out a full life. She had better odds of meeting his great-great-great grandchildren than her lost flame. It wasn’t something she needed to be burdened with, and so Millie ensured she wasn’t.

As luck would have it, Vik was surprisingly easy to keep distracted. Whether it was a trait of her personality or a side effect of her limbic controls, steering Vik away from dangerous thoughts was as simple as inserting a few harmless lines of junk data into her cognitive processes and watching the thought fly apart like dandelion fluff. It was an elegant solution that registered as a bout of forgetfulness for Vik, and it significantly cut back on how often Millie needed to restore her mind to a stable backup.

From the lens mounted above the storage room door, she glanced down at the body she’d stepped out of and took a few mils to verify that its batteries were charging. As she did this, she couldn’t help but be amused at the state it was in. The gray, genderless mech wore an approximation of the tiara Twilight Sparkle had once been offered and notoriously turned down to the scandal of a large part of Equestria. Vik had one of the fabricators mill it out of bronze bar stock, each curved section slotting together with hairline dovetails and countersunk brass screws to give the adornment a vaguely jigsaw appearance. She’d insisted on having Millie wear matching accessories on each hoof, something Millie had protested until Vik allowed the fabricators to apply a layer of nonslip rubber to each sole. Letting Vik entertain herself by inflicting mild torture was all well and good, but Millie wasn’t about to have a valuable mech damaged by having it skate around on brass shoes.

She gave the body a final glance before dropping her connection to the camera and turning her attention toward the only other user on Stable 48’s network. She found Vik where she’d left her on level four, among the empty garden plots of Agriculture.

“Well, has inspiration struck?” she asked.

Vik peered up at Millie’s camera, a paint roller occupying one hand while the other rested on her hip. A small army of spiders stood in an orderly crescent around her, some balancing open buckets of paint on their carapaces while others held up paint trays with additional rollers already loaded with a variety of colors and shades. The wall in front of her was a madhouse of intersecting hues that stretched off to her left down the corridor before wrapping back around behind her. It was the most recent of Vik’s projects meant to occupy her pacing mind. When Millie last checked in, Vik had tentatively named the cacophony of aggressive strokes Ribbons.

Whether they were the lacy kind, or the sort unfortunate ponies were sometimes cut into was anyone’s guess.

Moss green paint dripped off the end of the roller in her hand, pattering onto and running down the extended leg of the spider closest to her. Her expression was thoughtful and dissatisfied. A good sign, Millie thought.

“I don’t know what to do next,” Vik murmured.

Millie checked her cognitive feed. It wasn’t throwing more errors than usual, so this just meant Vik was undecided. “Try blue,” she offered.

Vik glanced down at the green roller in her hand, then over to the spider holding a tray of periwinkle blue paint. She exchanged the rollers, seemingly unconcerned of the chromatic contamination, and slapped the roller against the wall with a wet smack. The paint smeared over the gray concrete before the roller began to turn and the result was a blue arc that gained texture as it progressed across the black slash she’d painted several minutes ago.

“Yeah,” Vik said, nodding at the new mark she’d made. “I like that. It reminds me of the sky.”

Millie regarded the project in progress and doubted there had ever been a sky like this on any planet, let alone the one they were on. It looked to her like a slasher movie set in a rainbow factory. Calling it art was clearly a step too far.

“It’s a wonderful demonstration of expression,” Millie allowed, and was pleased to see how it made Vik smile.

“Pretty sure I’m just making a mess down there,” Vik said. Then, “It beats doing nothing.”

A glance at Vik’s processes clarified the question of whether that last statement was aimed at her. It was.

“Surviving an apocalypse is hardly nothing.”

She watched Vik bend and run her roller through a pan offered up by one of the spiders. Blue hues mingled with yellow, blending them into an irreversible new shade that she applied to the wall with a hard, vertical stroke. The images she was making were nonsense, as if someone had peeled away each band of the rainbow and crumpled them into a tangle of color.

“You say that,” Vik said, giving the green stroke she’d made a few hard passes to solidify the coating, “but this isn’t exactly what I would call surviving.”

That was new information to her. “Elaborate, please.”

Vik set down the roller and crossed one paint smeared arm over the other. “There’s nobody else here. Nobody else to talk to except you. No offense.”

“It’s alright.”

“It’s not,” Vik insisted. “I keep getting this feeling that I’ve been walking around this place longer than I have. I keep trying to remember what day it is, and...”

Millie hesitated for a few milliseconds and checked to be sure Vik was operating at the second by second framerate Millie had set her to. She felt relieved when she confirmed the timescale hadn’t slipped. If Thimble had taught her anything, it was how easy it was for an organic mind to fracture under the stresses of clear millisecond by millisecond sensory input.

“And this body…” Vik continued, unaware of Millie’s momentary concern. She shifted her stance as she spoke, moving her hip out to one side as she looked down at the interlocking gray shape of her draconic mech. “I’m glad to have it, don’t get me wrong…”

Millie waited, having learned from long experience that it was better to let her find her own words during moments like these.

Vik let out a plaintive sigh. “It isn’t me. I’m not even sure if I’m me. At least, not the me that I was when I was alive. Sometimes I feel like I’m a ghost and all I’m really doing is possessing the furniture. I’m not even that good at it because this body runs out of charge before half a day is up, and then I’m stuck clomping around in one of your spares.”

“If you would like to have your power supply upgraded, I will assign one of my partitions to research the technology.”

That only appeared to irritate Vik even more, and her limbic controls increased their output to level her out. “That’s another thing. You never let me make my own modifications.”

“You’re not a qualified engineer,” she reminded.

“Then teach me!” Vik shouted, her tone flickering with momentary heat. “How hard can it be to stick the instructions in my head or hard drive or whatever and let me have a purpose other than trying to survive my own boredom? You won't even let me go outside!”

Ah. There it was. She'd wondered when that would bubble up again.

“If you would like a work assignment like you had with CryoLife, I can give you–”

Before she could finish, Vik had unfolded her arms and cocked back her balled right fist. She pistoned it into the concrete wall with sufficient force to cause a shallow, dish-sized section of it to spall away in brightly painted chips. They fell to the floor with a sound like dry rice on tile as Vik retracted her arm. The closed fist resembled a crushed soup can, utterly useless and immobile as black hydraulic fluid drizzled from ruptured lines. Her forearm was visibly bent where the titanium rods meant to substitute bone had deformed.

“Stop treating me like your fucking pet.”

Millie had been about to chastise her for the tantrum, but the danger in Vik’s tone made her believe it would be best not to pour fuel on a fire that was already coming back under control. Instead, she made a note for herself to adjust her limbic controls once this confrontation was finished. When she finally responded, she carefully inflected her words with the defeat Vik would be listening for.

“I truly hope that you don’t believe that’s how I look at you. I consider you my friend, Vik. You’re one of a very short list of individuals who treated me with respect, even before the world fell apart. I just wish that you could trust that I’m doing what is needed to keep you safe.”

Vik’s lip twitched away from ceramic teeth, the distraction that had been her recent art project utterly forgotten now. She grasped her ruined arm in her left hand and lifted it for Millie’s camera to see. “I broke my arm, Mills. If I were me, this kind of damage would have laid me out on the floor screaming and right now I feel like nothing’s wrong.”

A chime sounded at the far end of the corridor where a spider the size of a medium sized dog clambered out from one of the Stable’s two service elevators. Its two forelimbs gripped the handle of a utility cart, atop which rode a clear bag of desiccated spackle and container of water. Millie watched as Vik narrowed her eyes at the approaching spider like an intruder. When the small flock of spiders carrying her paint supplies parted to make room, Vik reluctantly gave way and silently watched as the newcomer parked its cart and began mixing water and spackle into a thick putty with rubber-tipped appendages.

“I want permission to self-examine,” Vik stated flatly.

Millie switched to the maintenance spider and swiveled one of its multiple lenses up to look at her. “I’m sorry, no.”

Vik caught her change in perspective and rounded on the spider’s lens. “Then let me go outside.”

“Again,” Millie repeated, her tone warning, “no. There is no infrastructure out there to relay your carrier signal, and I fail to see what you’ll gain by walking a highly customized mech out into the elements just for you to lose connection and not be able to retrieve it. It’s a waste of resources, and moreover it’s an unnecessary risk.”

The spider turned to smear spackle into the concavity Vik’s fist had knocked into the wall and Millie jumped to a rear-facing lens when it did. Probabilities were high that Vik was well on her way toward another soft reset, and that would do just fine for Millie. Another several months of peace and amiability between the two of them was a reliably pleasant prospect.

“You’re lying to me,” Vik murmured.

Inwardly, Millie heaved a sigh and began spooling up Vik’s most recent backup.

Vik jabbed a finger at the maintenance spider busily marring her paint with streaks of gray spackle. “The spiders carried my coffin here all the way from Cold Storage. That means you already set up relays for them to connect to.”

“I dismantled them thirty-nine years ago, Vik.” Honesty didn’t matter at this stage. She would remember none of it. “Between the Enclave and Steel Rangers, I couldn’t afford to leave the relays where they might be seen. Besides which, I didn’t need to return to Cold Storage after you were retrieved.”

Vik froze. The maintenance spider paused its work to regard her with its forward lenses, its carapace slumping a little as Millie watched the realization dawn on Vik all over again.

“I’ve been here for thirty-nine–?”

In the fraction of a second between nine and years, Millie’s system sent confirmation that Vik’s backup was ready for deployment. She executed the command and watched the lines of Vik’s processing output stutter and zero out before she could form the next phoneme. The draconic mech relaxed, went still, and then turned as its automated functions took over to guide it to its charging pad upstairs.

Millie watched it walk away, then turned the maintenance spider to consider the unfinished mural coating a little more than half of the Agricultural level. It would be difficult to remove, so she assigned a dozen spiders to the task of painting over it. As for Vik, she would try again.

There was always time to try again.

The outsider squinted into her lens, tapped it with the edge of his hoof, then frowned as he descended back to the broken pavement outside the blast door. Millie watched him adjust the strap of his rust-pocked rifle, look around the reborn yet struggling pines, and vanish out of frame as he went off to wherever his traveling companions waited.

She lowered her framerate and waited. The sickly branches of the new forest turned old again jittered and stuttered as her perception of time leapt forward. She pushed her framerate lower, forcing herself to ignore the visual artifacts that formed in the exterior camera’s fixed view. It had been meant to be hidden, small enough to go unnoticed among the dark speckles in the formed concrete above the great cog. And yet this nameless pegasus had zeroed in on it like he knew where it would be.

After an hour of real time had elapsed and no new faces appeared at the door, Millie allowed herself to relax and restore her default timescale. The branches ceased their spastic jerking and swayed easily in the morning breeze. A cockroach the size of a terrier wandered into view, then out again, and that was all.

If the pegasus was from the Enclave he surely didn’t carry himself like one of them. His kit had looked worn and scratched together. His weapon, a simple hunting rifle with a broken scope still attached, seemed just as liable to explode in the user’s wing as it was to fire. Yet he’d known where to find the exterior camera which meant he was unusually familiar with Stables. If not with the Enclave, then with one of the bandit groups in the area who had a nasty habit of broadcasting in the clear. If not with them, then possibly just some unaffiliated survivor. Perhaps even a resident of a different Stable.

Whoever he was with didn’t matter. He was an outsider. A threat to herself and to Vik. They could fight their little wars and boast over the open air all they liked as long as they kept their troubles on their side of the door. Stable 48 was her territory, and she would defend it enthusiastically.

“You’re useless. Move.”

Maybe it was just Vik’s imagination, but the teapot sized spider backed away from the section of corroded pipe it had been trying to cut with a defeated slouch to its scuttle. The tiny flame of the torch at the end of its leg went out with a sad little pop and it watched as Vik checked her balance on the stepstool before gripping the section of pipe with left hand and giving the shallow scoring made by the spider a single, controlled jab of her right fist.

The old pipe cracked at the seam and vomited a stream of rust stained water out onto the corridor floor. Vik set her jaw as she gripped the loose end in both hands and began twisting it back and forth with hard little jerks until she heard the snap several dozen yards away where it had been joined to the next length. Seeing that its task had been completed, the spider slinked away to attend to the next item in its queue. Vik watched it leave, her irritation rising as she tried not to count how many times she’d needed to intervene for a spider too small for the work it had been assigned.

It was happening more often now, and the part that got under her nerves was that Millie was pretending it wasn’t. It felt like the AI was gradually evolving into a middle manager, tasking unqualified workers to projects they could barely finish while putting on a corporate smile to assure everyone that everything was fine. Vik’s perception of time had always been a little fuzzy - a symptom that Millie attributed to her organic mind still adjusting to the lack of a need for a day/night cycle, or something like that - but she was almost positive that the problem had been getting worse for at least a couple of months now, maybe longer. The constant work, while stimulating, was also a distraction in that regard.

A series of hard, downward jerks on the mineral-choked water line broke it out of its mounting brackets in a cascading wave that ended with the pipe crashing to the floor like a metallic snake. Vik enjoyed the brief feeling of satisfaction that came with being allowed to actually break something, even if it meant more work cleaning up the mess she’d made. The brackets would need to be torn out and remounted where the bolts hadn’t stripped out the concrete. The pipe would have to be cut into pieces small enough to drop into the recycler chute. She’d have to mop.

Without much deliberate thought, she queued up the new tasks and assigned herself to each of them. It wouldn’t pay to let the automated systems assign spiders to the work if it meant she would find them making a bigger mess of it later in the day. Her direct attention, as it always seemed to be, was on the manufacturing queue down in Fabrication. She muttered something profane as it reported all of her pending requests still stuck in the backlog. Millie had prioritized the building of more spiders once again, and once again Vik rolled her eyes as she envisioned just how few if any of them she’d ever see assigned to the vital work of keeping Stable 48 from falling apart.

She opened the flap of the toolbelt she’d fashioned for herself and retrieved the C-shaped pipe cutter from it. She tightened the opposing blades around the first length of pipe, rotated them to make the score line, tightened the nut again, and repeated. That irritated her, too. The spiders, for all their recent scarcity, were allowed to enjoy the little upgrades Millie bestowed them without having to weedle or beg. For some, their carapaces had compartments in which they could stow tool attachments or materials. Others, like the one Vik had shooed away, were specialized units equipped with small yet effective cutting torches. A few even sported brass fittings that could be connected to a compressor hose, allowing them the use of a variety of pneumatics. Vik called them brassholes.

Yet her body remained unchanged from when… well, whenever it had been Millie had dropped her consciousness into it. Whenever she needed to change out one of the matte gray panels that mimicked the curves of her living body, she used identical replacements. Every bolt, every socket, and every hydraulic line had a part number from which Millie refused to deviate. Whenever Vik suggested redesigning the outer casing to appear more like her old scales, Millie flatly declined citing vague risks of psychological instability or fractured identity. Excuses that Vik was almost certain were as fabricated as her spiders.

Spiders which seemed to be falling off the edge of the world as fast as Millie was making them.

As the cutter sank through the last layer of metal and the first length of pipe dropped free, Millie’s voice came from a nearby speaker. “We have a problem.”

Vik dragged the pipe toward her and clamped the cutter around the next section. “Alright.”

A pause. Millie didn’t like it whenever Vik was deliberately ambiguous. But then Vik had been stewing in pent up frustration all day and Millie hadn’t once bothered to ask what was wrong, so it felt justified. For a moment it seemed as if Millie might choose now to crack that particular egg, and she felt her irritation ratchet one notch higher when Millie didn’t.

“There is a group of outsiders gathered in front of the Stable. I believe–”

Vik dropped the cutter, her voice suddenly thready with hope. “Is Pike with them?”

“–they intend to break in,” Millie finished. Then, almost as an afterthought, “No. Pike is not with them.”

She’d begun walking before she realized she was doing it, passing residential compartments in rapid succession as she put herself on the fastest route to the stairwell. If there were survivors outside they would need her help. Food, water, medicine, sanitation. The big four. They might freak out when they saw her but they could deal with that when it came. There was a chance one of them had seen Pike or knew which way he might have gone.

When she hit the stairs, she was already at a dead run. Servos and metal joints clicked and sighed as she sprinted up the flights toward Level One, toward the Atrium, and toward the great cog that sealed out the apocalypse.

Millie’s voice cut through her excitement like a knife. “We are not allowing them inside.”

She stopped running. Stopped walking. Millie’s negation echoed through the hollow channel of the stairwell like a cracked bell. Her hand tightened around the railing.

“Explain that.”

“They have made threats,” Millie stated with a tone like she was talking to a particularly dense child, “and they believe they are sufficiently armed to carry those threats out, should they get inside.”

When Vik relaxed her grip, a sheet of paint flakes clung to her palm where they’d sheared off the metal. She remembered the broadcast she and Pike heard over the radio, the one encouraging survivors to come to Manehattan. The long walk the two of them had been stockpiling supplies ahead of.

“Is it the military?”

There was a hint of gallow’s humor in Millie’s answer, like she was smiling as she spoke. “No, I doubt these ponies are affiliated with any military. From what I’ve gathered so far, they’re some kind of community of bandits or highway robbers.”

Vik resumed her ascent, but she was walking now. “What, like in old western movies? What makes you say that?”

“Their behavior, I suppose. Several factors. It looks like they’ve scavenged some welding equipment and intend to cut their way through the blast door.”

“Can they?”

“No. The blast door is six feet of annealed tungsten. They could put a torch to it for a year and all it would do is make it glow a little. I’ll start to worry when they start passing out grinding wheels.”

She wasn’t sure if Millie was being serious or trying for humor, but that just meant today was a day that ended in Y. Millie was always a bit of a mystery even at the best of times, and right now Vik was starting to feel like this wasn’t one of those times.

The stairwell door swayed open on squeaking hinges. Vik absently added that to her own queue as well. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t be worried.”

“No,” Millie said. “You should. I certainly am.”

She frowned. “And the reason is…?”

“Because one of them,” Millie sighed, “is wearing a Pip-Buck.”

When Millie gave her access to the single pinhole camera embedded in the concrete arch outside Stable 48’s behemoth door, Vik thought there was a problem with her connection or that perhaps the lens had been damaged. The abrupt transition of her vision blinking out where her draconic body stood in the corridor and being replaced by the monocular view of the Stable’s front doorstep had given her a vague sense of nausea that was made slightly worse by the absence of a GI tract.

Her periphery was an uneven ring of what appeared to be black spikes that only made sense when Millie explained one of the ponies outside had flown up to apply a layer of black pitch over the camera. Millie had waited until nightfall to call up one of the three maintenance spiders she’d had outside when the visitors had come, and used it to scale the arch and scrape the pitch away. Its effort had restored the visual component, but the audio had been reduced to a muddy morasse of unintelligible noise.

When Vik had asked why she needed maintenance spiders outside the Stable, however, Millie refused to answer.

She’d been about to press that particular issue, but then she saw the camp being built outside their door and the question fell away. For Vik, the word camp produced a predictable set of images in her mind. A fire burning inside a ring of stones, surrounded by tents and folding chairs. Hot dogs on sticks over the flames. Clamshell skillets for making pudgy pies. Or, barring all that, just a few sleeping bags under the stars. What was being constructed by the ponies within her narrow bird’s eye view was nothing like that.

She could see what appeared to be two distinctly different structures taking form on either side of the shallow, semicircular slab that served as the Stable’s welcome mat. The one on the left was roughly the size of a telephone booth and was being nailed together by a unicorn and earth pony duo out of uneven lengths of board. The planks were as bleached as driftwood and seemed to split often enough that the unicorn’s job was to tighten loops of electrical wire around the breaks like roughshod tourniquets just to keep them from falling off the nails. A heap of soil partially obscured by the ring of pitch suggested they were building an outhouse. One that would probably cave in on whoever tried to use it first. To the right, a larger building was being framed on top of an uneven floor of shipping pallets. One of the walls, if it could be called a wall, was currently being held vertical by a small team of ponies while two others hustled between hammering strips of scrap metal into braces and using them to secure the mess of boards to the equal mess of flooring.

It was as if they had made a deliberate effort to choose the worst materials possible to build with, and none of them seemed to care. As ponies walked in and out of view, Vik started to pay closer attention to their attire. For one, nearly all of them were wearing something which, for ponies, was like watching a fish crawl out of the ocean and start walking. It was bizarre. They wore bits of cloth and leather, some fashioned into satchels or slings, others wearing scarves or collars, and one stallion who had wrapped the entirety of his tail into a braided, black bullwhip. It was almost enough to distract from the distressing variety of weapons they all wore, but not quite.

Most kept some form of pistol holstered within easy reach, though some wore larger weapons ranging from rifles to machetes. Several, especially the unicorns for reasons she didn’t understand, seemed to favor keeping several lightweight knives sheathed wherever they could belt the scabbards. It all would have been ridiculous were it not for the grim way the outsiders went about their work, as if their guard was up even around their friends.

As she watched, an earth pony approached the curved concrete slab where a unicorn mare sat alone. The earth pony stopped a few feet away from the unicorn and gestured at the Pip-Buck she was working on with a casual wave of his hoof. The mare glanced up at him, shook her head, and returned to her work as if he’d already gone. Vik watched the stallion square his shoulders for a moment, relax, and then turn and walk away.

“That’s her?”

Millie’s voice came from everywhere, and she spoke over Vik when she spat a surprised curse. “Yes.”

A glint of light reflected off the stylus the mare used to peck at the screen, its tip flashing over the touch sensitive keyboard fast enough to make Vik wonder if her artificial body would be able to keep up. The Pip-Buck’s screen was too small for the little camera to make out what she was typing, but Vik could think of a few guesses.

“What is she writing?” Vik asked anyway.

A black window appeared in the field of Vik’s view and it streamed with the jittering blocks of text and symbols that she knew enough to attribute to computer code. It took her a few seconds to convince herself it wasn’t the universe’s worst floater and just a secondary display. The text was complete gibberish until she realized that, really, it wasn’t. If she had been connected to her body she would have frowned at that, but since she wasn’t she settled for imagining it instead.

As she read through the feed, she began picking up the telltales of call and response and realized she was eavesdropping on a conversation. The mare outside pecked away at her Pip-Buck, trying to convince the Stable’s network to grant her a connection. The network, administered by Millie, rejected each and every request on the basis that the Pip-Buck wasn’t registered to this Stable. Clearly this did nothing to deter the mare because she seemed to be working her way down a memorized list of request formats.

Vik observed the exchange in real time, and she understood on some level that each denial was being written and sent by Millie herself.

“You’re just wasting her time.”

There was a half-smile in Millie’s reply. “Yes, well, it isn’t as if I have much choice. If I left the job to Stable-Tec’s outdated security software, the blast door would have rolled open for her two days ago.”

Vik blinked. Or at least she tried to. “You serious?”

“Deadly serious, and worse yet is that she knows it. Her first attempt succeeded in spinning up the door’s locking armature before I understood what was happening and put a stop to it.”

On the platform, the mare shot an annoyed look at the pair of stallions constructing the latrine before turning her attention back to the Pip-Buck’s screen. It was hard to tell from this distance but the device looked worn down in a way that spoke of age rather than hard use. Like she bought the thing in an antique store.

“Stupid question,” Vik began, “but why is it that I can suddenly read computer code?”

Millie’s tone was a shrug. “I’m translating for you.”

“In real time?”

“Yes.”

Vik wanted to ask how that worked but didn’t want to give the impression she was biting the hand that fed her. Or hoof. Or whatever the equivalent was for an artificial intelligence.

“Okay then. Should we be worried that they’re building…” she regarded the lopsided collection of boards and sheet metal the outsiders were binding together into a roughly wall-shaped object, “...whatever it is they’re building?”

She waited through one of Millie’s inexplicable pauses, though this one made Vik feel like she wasn’t trying to hide something more than she was trying to decide how to explain it. When she answered, there was a dispassionate edge that reminded Vik of the television reports she’d seen from Vhanna’s largest port city shortly after the Equestrian Army burned down well over a third of it.

Port Tigray. That was it. She remembered the face of the young zebra journalist, eyes wide and red rimmed with unvarnished fear, as she took shelter beneath a bright orange awning of a small business while gunfire crackled nearby.

Millie’s voice had the same, matter-of-fact drone that failed to adequately mask her outrage.

“Their first scout knew where to find the exterior camera, and the young mare sitting on our doorstep successfully began a test cycle on our exterior blast door within a few minutes of arriving with the other outsiders. They’re armed, and they’re building what appears to be a permanent settlement which strongly suggests they’re more than happy to put in a great deal more effort to breach our Stable.”

She paused to let that sink in before continuing. “Vik, this isn’t something we can ignore. If that mare decides to give up on the door and starts probing for security footage, she only needs to get lucky once.”

Vik watched the mare hunched over her work. Her anemic cloud of magic moved the stylus into a frenetic blur as someone walked over to her and started speaking. There was no audio, but Vik didn’t need to hear to see her annoyance when she dropped her ears back. The other pony frowned as she said something, gestured harshly at the computer strapped to her foreleg, and continued glaring until he left her alone. Whoever she was, she had more pull than the others.

“You’ve got spiders out there,” Vik said eventually. “Can’t you tell one to run up on whoever she is and break her Pip-Buck?”

Millie’s response was emphatic. “No. They cannot know about us.”

“Why? It isn’t like–”

“Because to them, we are not people. We’re assets. Technologies to be used for whatever purposes they assign us. If they see inside this Stable - see you, Vik - it will only be a matter of time before word gets out and the powers that be see this place as their next battleground. Believe me, I know what it’s like to be treated as a wrench.”

She felt the sense of Millie’s attention panning down toward the survivors making camp outside. “If those people are who I think they are, they’re not here to make friends.”

Somewhere beyond the static view of the exterior camera, Vik felt her brow lower. “Who are they?”

Millie’s momentary hesitation was like half a confession, but before Vik could think to pry at the loose edge of it Millie was speaking. “Outsiders. They’re dangerous. This is our home, and we can’t afford to lose it. If they get inside, we need to be prepared to defend ourselves. ”

Vik imagined stepping away from the camera feed and her connection to it dropped. She was back in the corridor near the Atrium. When the brief disorientation wore off, she looked down at her hands and the artificial amalgamation of oiled titanium wrapped in scuffed plastic skin. Then she looked up at the concrete encased hall, and the steady glow of fluorescents powered by a generator she didn’t understand beyond the knowledge that her existence was tethered to it.

Her hesitance caught her by surprise. This Stable had never been meant for only her. It had been built to preserve the safety of hundreds of ponies who by freak chance hadn’t survived the evacuation. There was room for the ponies outside. There was water, rations, and seed stock still in storage capable of jump-starting the unused plots down in Agriculture. The right thing to do would be to open the Stable and end whatever desperate circumstances drove them here.

But then she remembered Ripple and Sift. Recalled how they’d talked their way into the frozen home she and Pike had been searching for supplies, how they worked their way close and started in with the polite threats. Sift’s amicable smile as he told them he knew where they were holed up, and how they owed him and his partner for getting to the best spoils ahead of them. How it was their fault they’d been starving to death and how no amount of cooperation was going to make it better.

The way Ripple kept his revolver out of view until he was ready to draw on them. The way the bullets felt as they ripped her open. The sound that roared out of Pike’s throat when realization slammed into him like a moving truck.

A cold clarity washed over her. There were things Millie wasn’t telling her. Things she knew that would require an explanation, like how she knew who these outsiders were and what she’d meant by the powers that be, but those could come later.

She nodded at nothing as the decision made itself. If the outsiders had even a fraction of the ill intent of Sift and Ripple, Stable 48 could not fall to their control.

“Alright. Let’s put together a welcome wagon.”

It seemed for every shortcoming that came with being an uploaded mind in a manufactured body, there were benefits. On one hand, it was a uniquely lonely experience. Coaxing Millie out of her wires and circuits and into one of the standby bodies was like trying to corral a cat into a bath. Vik spent more time talking at the ceiling than she did walking with her last remaining friend, which meant there was rarely ever an instance of Millie leading or pointing the way.

The hidden benefit was that Vik never needed directions.

The glowing yellow line on the floor wasn’t real, but as far as Vik was concerned it may as well have been. She followed it through the corridors where it occasionally bent ninety degrees down an adjacent hall, jittering its way down winding stairs until it spilled out into the mechanical spaces near the bottom of the Stable. Here she could feel the subtle vibrations of the generator through the sensors in her bare feet. The interfaces Millie created for her tried their best to replicate the complex scents of acetone and machine grease, hot metal and air that would probably suffocate her if she still had lungs. It registered as a faint unpleasantness, but nothing more. Despite it, she followed the line.

It led her through rows of pristine workbenches, empty supply carts, and a bay of bright orange forklifts still as new as the day they were made. A couple dozen spiders roamed through Mechanical, their little bodies sturdy enough to carry what items and tools they needed piecemeal rather than by the pallet. She stepped over a pair carrying a shared load of conduit pipe as Millie’s line pointed her through a set of double doors emblazoned with the words: OUTBOUND SCRAP.

It was a temporary storage area she’d seen once or twice before in her wanderings. A marked path ran a rectangular loop around stacks of heavy duty racking, each row of which was occupied by palletized blue tubs the size of a small carriage. With the spiders carrying any waste material to the nearest recycler chute, most of Mechanical had been made redundant save for its generator. That, more than anything else, was what Millie had brought her down here to protect.

Beyond the disused shelves was a single red door, the kind with hinges and a handle instead of a hydraulic line. Vik didn’t remember seeing the last time she was here, but there it was. Two words graced it near the top stenciled in white paint: UTILITY CLOSET. The yellow line wrapped it like a glowing frame.

Vik pulled it open, saw what was inside, and her eyes grew a degree wider. Among the breaker boxes and a labyrinth of conduit stood three suits of rust-speckled power armor.

“Huh,” she said.

“You don’t sound impressed,” Millie’s voice echoed from the storage racks behind her.

She folded her arms across her chest, the sound of plastic rasping over plastic hardly registering as strange anymore. “I thought we already discussed that I wasn’t a fan of walking around on all fours.”

“You’re capable enough at it,” Millie said, maneuvering as she spoke. “And if I recall, the context of that discussion was a little different then. The P-45 is a formidable armament regardless of the intended pilot’s species.”

Her mind spun as she crossed the threshold and made a slow lap around the three units. Fine dust had caked in every crevice and seam, and blooms of rust pushed up through cracked forest green paint. She had only seen power armor on television and in newspapers, but never up close like this. It took her a second lap to work out how the armor opened to accept its pilot. Jointed panels formed a seam against the pony’s spine, blooming open to presumably let them crawl out or maybe just shimmy backwards. She wondered about that.

“They’re missing some bolts,” she commented, touching the threaded socket where what looked like a structural bolt had been pulled out and lost. When her hand slid up to the seam of one of the suits, the panel beneath it gave a little like it was loose on its actuators. “Where’d you find these things? The dump?”

Millie’s attenuated voice echoed from beyond the door. “They were always here.”

Vik subdued a frown before it could form. Millie lied to her just then.

“I guess Stable-Tec thought of everything,” she murmured, noting the spot where it looked like fine metal tips had scraped through the paint. “Be nice if we had one that was a little more bipedal, though. How long do you think it would take the fabricators to whip up something like this my size?”

“Provided we had the luxury of time,” Millie said in her lecturing tone, “which we do not; it would be a waste of resources. The armor alone weighs more than your mech, say nothing for the exoskeleton beneath. The amount of batteries required to move that much mass would require you to pull them behind you in a trailer.”

Well, that was bullshit. She was standing among three examples of mechanized armor that didn’t need a little red battery wagon. To make her point, she gestured at them expectantly with both hands.

“The Mk.II M.A.S.T. power cells in that armor are a far cry from the rechargeable batteries inside your chosen body.” Then, as if reading Vik’s mind, “Perhaps when we aren’t quite literally under the gun we can exchange wish lists and braid each other’s manes, but in the meantime would you please shut up and get in the fucking armor?”

Vik blinked. “Yeah. Okay, Mills.”

The power armor was slow, lumbering, and responded to Vik’s controls like it was only paying half attention to the inputs. Old technology operating on its own schedule as opposed to the lightning quick throughput Millie built into everything else in this Stable. The armor hadn’t been built for remote use. There were no lenses behind the dusty black visor to tap into, no software routines to send commands to walk or stand still. The computer tucked away beneath its plating handled simple tasks like target acquisition and provided rudimentary damage reports generated by an array of tiny impact sensors wired throughout the exoskeleton.

It was less a robot and more mechanical dress attire. You couldn’t tell an overcoat to walk. For that, someone or something needed to be inside it.

Millie’s answer to that hurdle had been to stuff the armor with obedient spiders and simultaneously direct them to manipulate the suit’s controls manually. Vik’s solution had been more elegant and didn’t require her to divide her attention a dozen different ways. She’d parked the only draconic body Millie had built her in a chair at one of Mechanical’s empty workstations, dropped into one of the slackfaced equine versions Millie refused to get rid of, and walked it downstairs to the waiting armor and climbed in.

The end result was an uploaded mind inside a mechanical body, inside a mechanical weapons platform. It would have been fertile soil for a dirty joke if either machine hadn’t been utterly genderless.

“Tell me again why you’re not driving one of these rigs around?” Vik asked, biting back the urge to add some choice profanity to get her irritation across. Being forced to trot around the Atrium like a show pony wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the input lag.

Millie’s reply was crisp. “If you prefer I devote less of my personal resources to denying entry to a literal raiding party, please do just say the word and I’ll make sure they find us together mid-stroll.”

Vik hoped Millie could see the eyeroll through the helmet’s visor. “Don’t need to be snitty about it.”

“I’ll be less snitty when you cease demonstrating a degree of density enough to make tungsten feel jealous. Now focus, please. The entire point of this exercise is to get you used to the concept of multitasking.”

“I’m a freaking artificial–”

“As far as the outsiders can know, you are a member of Stable 48 Security acting in the defense of your home. When they open the door, your job is to make them believe you’re just the tip of a larger spear that they can’t defend against.”

Vik glowered at the helmet’s display as she turned the armor to follow the Atrium’s perimeter, passing vacant alcoves where community voted entertainments and businesses were meant to occupy. “I got it, I got it. Scare them off and hope they become someone else’s problem. Don’t let them figure out we’re just a couple computers playing dolls in a Stable with a spider infestation.”

Millie’s disapproval with the simplification didn’t quite rise to the level of chastisement, but the edge of it was in her voice all the same. “I’m giving you new targets.”

She chinned the control in the suit’s helmet that toggled its shoulder mounted cannon into free-aim mode. Actuators within the weapon assembly kicked on as the barrel began tracking the direction of its visor. A bright, silver scar down one side of the weapon evidenced where she’d hooked the barrel around a support post for the Atrium’s upper walkway an hour earlier.

As she jogged along, Millie projected three of the outsiders directly into her visual processor. They appeared in the center of the Atrium, wearing a mismatched collection of leather straps and dirty rags that Vik had seen them in earlier. There were no visual artifacts to distinguish them as anything but real, even as they appeared to be on the other side of a dirty helmet visor. It was easily the coolest bit of tech Millie had designed in Vik’s opinion, and she wondered how hard it would be to add on a few other features. Maybe some haptic feedback, or a bit of code to convince her own sensory suite that what she was seeing had weight and resistance. Add in some mood lighting and a little music…

Gods, she was lonely.

The trio of outsiders did their standard startle-and-shock routine as if just now noticing the several tons of armor clomping along nearby. They produced a variety of weapons from an impractical number of holsters, most notably the pegasus who held matching pistols in each outstretched wing, and opened fire with B-rate movie gusto. Vik had no frame of reference to know if the light and sound of the gunfire was accurate, Millie’s auditory hallucination was realistic enough for the task.

She turned toward them and the armor’s barrel scraped on old gimbals as it came to bear. Rocking her weight back on her left foot - left forehoof toggled the safety switch to the suit’s fire system while simultaneously giving the same hoof enough room to slip into the space above where it normally rested within the suit and engage the trigger. It would never amount to the simplicity of wrapping a finger around a trigger and squeezing, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

She timed her stride with a clumsy double press of the trigger and the cannon barked as it fired each pair of blanks at the outsiders. A smile touched her lip as the pegasus dropped first in a dramatic I’ve been shot pratfall before dissolving into a haze of pixels. Red markers flashed momentarily on the far wall where the other shots went astray, and Millie took the liberty of prompting Vik’s armor to display damage indicators for the armor plates she’d kept facing enemy fire for a little too long. Vik turned away from the two remaining enemies and pushed the suit into a gallop, keeping an eye on the twin unicorns and in turn maintaining a bearing for the cannon as she squeezed off more of the blank rounds.

A lucky shot hit the ground in front of a unicorn and Millie generously counted what would have been a resulting spray of concrete and lead shrapnel as a kill. The unicorn threw himself backward with a yelp and dissolved before he hit the ground. The last target ducked for cover behind one of the Atrium’s oversized planters, but an icon marking his last known location gave Vik something to aim at and she sank several virtual rounds through the decor until a rising digitized mist told her she’d gotten him too.

“Not bad,” Mille said.

Vik came to a stop at the potted tree the last target had sheltered behind and soaked up the compliment. “Too bad you didn’t come up with this before the world shat the bed. Parents would have lined up around the block in a blizzard to get their foals something like this for Hearthswarming.”

“Provided they didn’t mind making room for a few server racks to run the simulation,” Millie mused. “I’m glad it’s effective. Your aim, however, could use significant work. Let’s try again, but with a slight change. I’m going to give you limited control to adjust your framerate so you’ll have more time to choose your targets.”

As Millie spoke, Vik became aware of something being added to her suite of sensory controls. A basic numeric value bracketed between one hundred and one hundred and fifty percent. Before Millie could explain how it worked, Vik turned the theoretical knob halfway and reality slowed around her. She could feel her eyes going wide, but the immediacy of the gesture took on an almost drunken, dreamy sluggishness. The only thing that seemed unaffected were her own thoughts.

“Huh,” she murmured, the sound of it resembling something like a nauseated moose. She snorted at that, and the resulting distortion sent her into a fit of disturbing laughter.

Millie pretended not to notice, and just like whenever Vik’s mind occupied some disembodied space, the AI’s voice came from nowhere and everywhere. “I’m glad to see you find this entertaining, but I would advise you to take care with making changes to your framerate. The distorted perception you’re experiencing now is nothing compared to what it’ll feel like if you overheat something critical.”

“Don’t overdo it,” Vik summarized. “Got it. Next test?”

As requested, three new projections blinked into existence where the last three had fallen. They wore variations of the same outfits, some mismatched bits of armor, and similar weaponry hung from straps and inside holsters. The only difference was the speed of their reaction to her, and the casual way they seemed to bring their guns to bear.

Vik failed to suppress a toothy grin with how much easier this made her target practice. The simulated raiders opened fire on her almost as if they were reluctant to make the effort, though their expressions bore the same exaggerated aggression and malice Millie had given them from the start. Bullets still flicked past at speeds too quick for her to respond to, but while simple physics meant she couldn’t compensate by darting around that much more quickly without causing significant damage to herself, the increased framerate gave her a comfortable buffer with which to judge each shot.

She tapped her hoof twice and the armor spat a matching pair of blanks from its shoulder cannon. A hit marker appeared on the trunk of the potted tree while a second tagged the sternum of the raider she’d been aiming for. He crumpled and vanished in a spark of pixels while she moved onto the others. Her aim still wasn’t great, and she assumed that was more due to her inexperience with things that went boom more than it was the monumental level of slop in the power armor’s gimbals, but she noted with a touch of pride that the last raider had fallen in a little over half the time of the previous test. It was an improvement.

“Again?” Millie offered.

Vik grinned like a cat. “Please and thank you.”

There was something strangely nostalgic about the way the brush took the paint into its bristles. Vik used the side of the can to wipe the excess away, turned the brush around, repeated, turned it again, repeated again. She noticed a drop the color of coffee creamer bent into a long tear shape where she’d stirred, turning the pale pink just a little paler. Contamination as expressed by pigment. It was familiar, but she couldn’t quite decide why.

Her thoughts went a little foggy just then and she lost the thread she’d begun to follow. She frowned, lifted the brush to the dormant suit of power armor, and drew several more strokes of pink across the bulky shoulder plate. It was the second suit she’d painted today and it was looking like she might get the one she’d parked up in the Atrium done before the Stable’s lights dimmed to signal nighttime. A few times, Vik had tried to keep a tally of the day-night cycles and had inevitably lost track of the task.

She’d become forgetful, and the realization that she had came as a surprise. When she asked Millie about it, she’d been told that it had to do with the organic nature of her original self. That because her mind had been wired in such a way that it could forget, it continued to forget as an uploaded consciousness simply due to its nature. That explanation had felt wrong at the time, and as it surfaced in Vik’s head now it still felt wrong.

Millie had lied to her, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t the first time. There were things about her day-to-day that didn’t add up. Problems, when she thought too deeply about them, that went fuzzy around the edges until they came apart like candy floss in water.

When she was twenty-two, back before the thought of leaving the home island ever occurred to her, her roommates had decided it was time to drag her away from her books and expose her to the concept of fun. She’d reluctantly given in and gone with them on an old fashioned bar crawl, each of them rotating who paid for the drinks and occasionally stopping to thin the alcohol with greasy street food and water. For all the capital city lacked, it had never run short of places to get shitfaced. They’d lost track of how many stops they’d made when someone drugged Vik’s margarita. Whatever their plan had been with her, it had been spoiled by Vik’s protesting stomach at the time. She’d only sipped at the drink before sending it back, and the two dragons who tried to coax her away from her party and onto the dance floor had been rebuffed by a dragoness who was not nearly as vulnerable as they’d expected.

Still, Vik had known something was wrong with her. Enough so that she’d made a scene insisting the night was over and she was going home, with or without her roommates. She’d been too embarrassed to explain why. Too unsure of herself to levy an accusation at the two dragons. In that moment, I feel funny felt thin and the drink she’d sent back had already been poured out.

She felt that same way now, and just like that night at the bar she wasn’t certain if she was overreacting or if Millie was doing something to make her mind hazy. She bent to dip the brush into the paint can again, grateful that Millie had allocated a few spiders to hold them up, then stopped when she caught her reflection on the surface of the paint. The gray of her panels had gone pink. Her tail flicked at the air behind her in recognition. That had been what she’d looked like not too long ago. Pale, iridescent scales edging between pink and cream.

She looked at the brush in her hand, at the spots where paint had smeared her rubberized palm and the sides of a few fingers, and felt her frown deepen. How long had it been? That seemed like something she should know, and it occurred to her that she couldn’t remember what day of the week it was. What month it was. That was alarming on a level that even the limbic controls couldn’t completely sand smooth.

“Hey, Millie?” she said, the worry in her voice making her voice echo slightly in the little utility room. “Why can’t I remember what day…?”

The words trailed off as they always did, and she felt a fleeting urge to scream out in frustration as the question fell away. Her frown softened. Her eyes went unfocused. Then she was jarred back to the present by the soft plop of the brush dropping into the paint bucket.

She blinked several times and looked down at her paint smeared hand, then at the power armor in front of her. Someone had drawn pink and cream slashes across the rusting plates like camouflage for an angry tea party. She snorted at that, glanced down at her paint stained palms, and snorted again. Had she done this? She must have, though the reason for it seemed unimportant.

“Vik?” Millie asked. “Are you alright?”

Reflexively, she nodded. “Yeah, I’m good. Just lost a few minutes, I think. I didn’t throw an error, did I?”

A pause, and something in Millie’s voice sounded glad. “A few, but no more than my routines generate on a given day. I’m afraid, however, that you’ll need to put away your paints and transfer to your armor. The mare outside has been making unexpected inroads with her Pip-Buck, and it would seem she is in the process of accessing the outer door controls. Move quickly.”

Vik’s eyes widened, and it took her a few seconds to call up the mech she’d left inside the armor upstairs and sync to it. As with every time she jumped from one body to another, there was a moment of sensory whiplash as her surroundings blinked out and snapped back into focus somewhere else. The utility room was gone, replaced by a green tinted Atrium as seen through her power armor’s helmet visor.

As she chinned the switch to boot up the armor, claxons began their grating squawk in time with the red pulse of emergency lights. Vik spat an impatient curse as she waited for the suit’s systems to wake up. There was never a good reason for claxons.

“They’re breaching the door,” Millie’s tinny voice came through her helmet’s internal speakers. “They’re inside the antechamber.”

“Well get in a fucking body and get up here!” she shouted, though what she really wanted was for Millie to stop giving her a play-by-play of everything she didn’t want to hear.

“I have two on the way down to Mechanical, but it’s going to take me time to bring the other suits back up. You’re on your own until then.”

The suit’s HUD blinked on and Vik shoved her foreleg into the sensors arrayed in the armor’s limbs, willing the lumbering thing to get moving. It thumped forward, stumbling slightly as she forced herself to stop trying to run like a dragon. “Why the fuck weren’t we ready for this? I don’t remember the last time I put this body on a charging pad! Fuck’s sake, Mills, it’s only got nineteen percent on the battery!”

“Then move quickly,” Millie snapped back, and Vik felt the visceral push in the words.

She clenched her jaw and stormed out of the Atrium and through Security, the suit’s bulk slapping dusty office chairs into desks as she passed. She barely had time to remember to tilt the barrel of her cannon down to avoid tearing down the arches of the decontamination chamber, and in the back of her mind it occurred to her that if she still had a heart it would be pounding in her throat right now. Small mercy not to worry about the distractions of biology. Before she could muse on that little epiphany further, she was through the chamber and on the steel grating of the antechamber.

Six raiders stood arrayed on the ramp leading to the open door. Above them, the hinged armature still spun as it retracted into its pocket in the ceiling. The outsiders were an even mix of gender and species, each wearing the same variety of leather armor, holsters, blades, and weapons she’d encountered in Millie’s combat sims. Their eyes widened with momentary shock as her armor came to a clanking stop, all of them seeming to notice the cannon on her shoulder at the same time and each of their expressions compressing into varying masks of determination.

More of them stood in the open doorway, and Vik could see the shapes of the ramshackle shelters they’d built further beyond.

Millie noticed her hesitation. “Vik, push them out.”

She pressed down on the safety release, and the cannon swiveled in line with her eyes. But there was something stopping her from pressing the other switch. The trigger.

Vik took an unnecessary breath, then spoke. “All of you need to leave. This Stable isn’t–”

The raider at the front of the group leveled something that looked like a length of plumbing held together with tape and fired. Vik shouted something obscene when a pair of spiderweb cracks erupted across her visor, only to shout again when the rest of the group took up a wordless battlecry and opened up with a unified volley of automatic weapons fire. The suit muffled the worst of the noise but the simple fact of knowing they were trying to kill sent enough animal panic past her limbic controls to motivate a response.

She pressed down on the trigger and the suit bucked as its armament fired, only where a spray of pixels once indicated a hit there was a spray of something darker and more permanent. She wasn’t aware she was saying, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” until the third raider was thrown back as if slapped by the hand of an angry god.

She’d begun descending the ramp when the evening sun slipped between the open teeth of the cogged doorway, blinding her visual sensors until she looked askance long enough for them to reset. An alarm in her suit started squawking and the damage indicator for her right foreleg flashed red. If there was a problem, it wasn’t affecting her mobility, so she chose to push forward and ignore it. At the foot of the ramp, one of the raiders bucked and crumpled as she fired into him and something dark and round tumbled from his wing. Too much was happening now for her to stay focused, and by the time she noticed that the pin was still in the grenade she’d already begun backing away from it.

“You have to clear them out!” Millie was shouting in her ear. “Push forward!”

Outside. She remembered wanting to go outside for something.

She shook her head, the helmet’s bearings grinding over dirty grease as she did, and made the mistake of looking into the setting sun again. She hissed a curse as her vision flashed white again while bullets slapped at her weakening armor like hail against the roof of a carriage. Then she remembered the exterior camera and got an idea. She just hoped her armor stayed upright as she checked.

She found the node for the pinhole camera and sent the connection request. Armor or no armor, she didn’t think it would be a good idea to stumble out into the open with no idea what was waiting for her. Checking the camera was just a good idea.

She tweaked her framerate to give her more time to react, and the flashbulb cacophony of gunfire slowed appreciably. The connection established, and she blinked out of the suit and felt the whiplash of her entire field of view shrinking to the vaguely fisheye perspective of the exterior lens. Through it she saw a familiar sight. There was the latrine, now finished and apparently the victim of heavy use if the worn dirt path leading away from it was any indication. The structure she’d seen coming together on the other side of the door was done, and it was apparently being used as a communal kitchen because she saw what looked like a rough lumber table tipped onto its side with several dozen mismatched plates and a spilled pot of something like stew pointing a messy line away from the outer platform.

What confused her, however, was the absence of the raiders she’d seen gathered along the door’s threshold. The camera showed her nothing but signs of people rapidly vacating the area, at least as far as it could see. But when she switched back to her suit, she saw exactly eleven silhouettes gathered in the doorway firing at her with every weapon they had at their disposal.

She toggled back to her suit, and they were there. Automatic and single-shot weapons bloomed fire and sparks flickered across the parts of her armor she could see, all of it happening in the slow motion of her heightened framerate.

Vik closed her eyes as understanding washed over her. The rage followed quickly after.

“Millie,” she murmured, her voice an exercise in barely contained violence, “stop it.”

A pause. “Vik, you need to push them out and get rid of that encampment or else…”

Whatever thresholds her limbic controls had, she could feel herself getting dangerously close to pushing beyond them. She was too angry for words. Nearly too angry to think straight as she pushed her armor forward and stomped through the Stable’s open door. The raiders spread out around her, shouting their threats and pouring gunfire at her as she stepped out onto the concrete pad beneath the exterior camera.

She jumped to it, sensed the briefest pushback as Millie failed to firewall the connection in time, and saw exactly what she knew she’d see.

Vik stood alone outside. The raider assault on the Stable wasn’t real.

But the outsiders had been. They still were, wherever they’d fled to. And Millie had just tried to trick her into gunning down every last one of them.

When she reconnected to her suit, the onslaught of gunfire was gone. The raiders were absent. Millie had killed the simulation because there was no point of keeping it running now that her lie had been revealed. Beyond the door stood a relatively small encampment that didn’t stretch much further than twenty yards. A short path led to a ring of tents of varying degrees of poor quality surrounding a large fire pit. Ashy smoke rose on a column of invisible heat where a pot of boiling water sent spits of water into the coals. A pair of roughly built structures, really just lean-tos made from old boards and something that looked like a fiberglass boat hull, stored firewood or contained the skinned carcasses of critters no larger than raccoons. In the distance through a screen of sickly and dead pines moved several shapes, likely the camp’s occupants up until the Stable door rolled open and cannonfire erupted from inside.

With a feeling like dread, Vik turned back to the open mouth of the Stable and looked at the places where she’d shot six raiders to death. She nearly collapsed in relief when the expected corpses didn’t appear. She wanted to sob, but the controls Millie installed pulled the urge away like a misbehaving puppy on a leash.

That was fine. She hadn’t killed anyone.

Only if she hadn’t checked the camera, she would have.

“What,” she said, her voice ratcheting up to a rattling shout, “the FUCK.”

“Oh, I would love to know the answer to that myself,” Millie chided from the antechamber speakers. “I have given you chance after chance to understand just how tenuous our circumstances are, and every–”

“I ALMOST KILLED THOSE PEOPLE!”

“–time you come back online your first and only concern is going outside and finding Pike as if there is any sane explanation for either action! You are one of the most frustrating–”

Vik leveled the suit’s cannon at the nearest speaker and felt it kick as three rounds tore the fragile device to shrapnel. With the simulation gone, the crashing echo of the attack rang the antechamber’s steel walls like a struck bell. If Millie had wanted to keep talking she could have done so through her helmet’s speakers, but the attack had rendered her silent for the time being. Good, Vik thought, let her worry what else I can break.

“That was unnecessary.”

The temptation to hunt down every last camera and speaker in the Stable was strong, but she stayed where she was outside the threshold. She could feel the limbic controls beginning to tip. For the first time since she woke up in Millie’s Stable, her voice trembled with barely contained malice.

“I am not. Your toy. To fuck with.”

The dismissal in Millie’s reply was infuriating. “Of course you aren’t. You’re my friend. I am trying to keep us safe.”

Vik shook her head and stabbed an armored hoof toward the overturned soup pot, the structures of nailed together trash, and the visible evidence of their panicked retreat. “From what?! These people? Are you out of you fucking mind?”

“If you cannot see the implicit threat posed by an encampment on our very doorstep, then that’s very much your defect. I have lost count of the times I have had to explain this to you, Miss Chambers!”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I will address you by whatever name I like so long as you choose to behave like a child.” The reserved calm fled Millie’s tone like smoke on the breeze. “Our existence is fragile! I know this because I have listened to them speak to each other over the radio and we cannot afford to allow them inside because they strip. Stables. Down. Do you understand what that means?”

Vik realized she didn’t, and she felt her rage lose a few degrees of its heat. “You never told me we had a radio.”

“I have, you just don’t remember.” Millie actually sighed. “It always comes down to this. I don’t know why you insist on making me do it.”

A flash of worry ran through Vik, but the outrage of nearly having been used as a tool for murder had too much momentum behind it for self-preservation to derail. She planted her hooves in a physical refusal of whatever Millie was leading up to. “How long has it been, Mills?”

The AI’s voice sounded tired, and a little sad. “Please be more specific, Miss Chambers.”

“How long since I died?”

A pause. “Two hundred and nine years, three months, and thirteen days.”

Vik went very still as the floor seemed to drop out from under her. Her rage evaporated as she tried to find the trace of sarcasm, the little joke buried in the words that had to be there. Two hundred and nine years. It was too big. Too much like a random, throwaway answer to be true.

And yet.

She turned to look back at the forest. At the sickly looking trees and the weird, thin patches of yellowing grass that clung around their trunks like weird parasites. She could remember the way the trees resembled burnt matchsticks in the months following the apocalypse. How there hadn’t been limbs on what was left standing because the firestorm had burned that hot. The winter snows had made the world look like a charcoal drawing.

There were a few dark stumps out there, still. Everything else was new growth. New growth that had grown old. Some of it very old.

“I think that’s enough for today,” Millie said, and the edge in her voice went a little sharper. Bitter. “I’m sorry to cause you discomfort, but I need to go out there and see what the fuck you have done to us. When that's done, we'll start from your original backup and try this again.”

“Original–?”

The universe blinked out.

…Boot sequence initializing.
…Verifying file integrity. Please wait.
…No corrupted files found.
…Checking hardware clock.
…Applying custom settings.
…Checking network card.
…Connecting to hostname: shelter048.local.sec
…Initializing secondary hardware.
…Loading backup.
…ERROR: The operation failed due to a device error encountered with either the source or the destination.
…Retrying.
…ERROR: The operation failed due to a device error encountered with either the source or the destination.
…Retrying.
…ERROR: The operation failed due to a device error encountered with either the source or the destination.
…Load from backup failed. Please contact your system administrator.
…No secondary backup found.
…Reboot from last session? Y/N
…
…
…
…No input detected. Booting VIK_v1.0.606 in safe mode.
…Please wait.

Vik woke up, and she could remember everything.

She was inside the storage area again in one of the default, equine versions of available bodies, only she had full autonomy now. For a moment she remained still, waiting for Millie to realize the error and shut her down again. To restore her from some older backup when she’d been more compliant. Before she’d known Millie was willing to use her to kill. When Millie did eventually speak, she sounded distracted and Vik had a decent sense of why.

“Welcome back, Vik. I’ll be with you in just a moment. Everything is alright.”

The limbic controls kept the nerves out of her response. It was the first good thing they’d ever done for her. “Sounds like a plan. I’ll just keep looking at this wall, I guess.”

Millie didn’t bother with a response, the same way Vik didn’t bother waiting around for her to discover she hadn’t come back online as a doe-eyed, blank slate. She backed off the charging surface, preparing herself to run, when she had a better idea. She queried the Stable’s network, located the other body she’d been using, and mentally crossed her fingers as she jumped across the connection blind. If she’d been offline longer than she thought, she might only find herself in one of the other bodies with her in the storage room. She had to hope she was right.

The storage room blinked out. The power armor’s interior appeared around her. Lacking its pilot, the suit had slumped forward and landed squarely on its chin. Her front half stared across the weathered concrete pad and into the open Stable while the armor’s ass end remained upright in an undignified gesture. The HUD was still active, which meant not enough time had passed for the crude software to go dormant. That was good.

From the woods behind her, she could hear the distant thud-thud-thud of cannonfire. Even before she righted herself to look, Vik knew what she was hearing. Between the trees, she spotted a flash of something large and pink. It was the armor she’d been decorating. For all the betrayal she felt from being led into a killing field by a simulation, the fact that Millie had been telling the truth about bringing another suit of power armor up from Mechanical to aid in the massacre only made Vik’s rage bloom hotter. She wanted to know how far Millie’s plan would have gone if it hadn’t fallen apart at the last moment. It was clear now that her fear of anyone who wasn’t Vik or Pike had festered and fallen in on itself over the course of her isolation. What if this had only been a prelude to something worse down the line? The first ante necessary to push Vik into bigger, more damning bets meant to preserve her self-inflicted hermitage?

Cannonfire drummed several more beats nearby, and Vik knew without needing to see that Millie was hunting and slaughtering the outsiders who had fled. Whatever she did now, it needed to be decisive. If Millie turned her attention toward her again, she would know something was wrong. By the time Vik felt the next reset coming, her loaned body would already be offline.

She bit back the vitriol boiling at the back of her throat and ran into the Stable. There was nothing she could do to help the people outside. All she could hope for is that they stayed alive long enough to keep Millie’s attention away from her.

Armored hooves drove divots into the antechamber’s grated floor, and she ducked through the decontamination chamber and the Security office beyond without damaging anything that would send up an alert. She needed to be quick, but more than that she needed to be careful. Even now she could feel the window dropping shut like a guillotine’s blade and one false step would decide whether or not her neck was caught in the gap when it landed.

Spiders scurried out of her way as she galloped out of the Atrium and into the Level One corridors. She knew where she was going. She knew the risk of what she was going to do when she got there. Still, when she recognized the intersection that would take her to Stable 48’s IT spaces she felt a single flush of doubt creep up on her. She ignored it and pushed the power armor around the corner and toward the security doors halfway down the hall.

She steeled her nerves when she saw the placard which read: SERVER ROOM - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. There was no chance in the world Millie would give her that authorization. Vik didn’t have autonomy over her own memories let alone access to the room containing the equipment that gave both of them life.

It turned out she didn’t need permission. Not when she had power armor.

In a split second of inspiration, she found her framerate interface and turned the knob as far as Millie’s restrictions would allow. Like it had during her weapons training, time lurched from its normal flow to a drunken stumble. It wasn’t much but she needed every advantage she could get. With an effort, she redirected several tons of fast moving power armor past the server room slab door and drove it shoulder-first into the concrete wall beside it.

There was a satisfying sense of give as the suit exploded through the wall and out the other side. Dust and debris sprayed across a startlingly white floor, bouncing off metal server racks and skittering between the gridwork of walkways between them like spilled marbles. Vik was aware of the security alert the instant it registered on the network. So would Millie, which was why Vik was glad she’d cranked her framerate.

Her eyes flicked to the first server in the first row of black racks. A white 01 stood emblazoned in its frame. It was a gamble, but she knew Millie well enough to know it was a good one. Millie hated disorder. It wouldn’t have made sense to install herself on anything but the first server.

As the first syllables of Millie’s furious admonishment bloomed across the overhead speakers, Vik brought the suit’s cannon to bear on the server and stomped the trigger.

“WHAT ARE–”

THUD-THUD-THUD.

Three twenty millimeter lead slugs marched a path of destruction up the center of Millie’s server. Plastic and silicon shrapnel disgorged itself out the other side, chasing the fast moving rounds as they destroyed two more unfortunate servers before shedding the rest of their velocity. Indicator lights flickered and died. Somewhere deep inside the cabinet, a cooling fan emitted a descending whine like a petulant scream.

Then, silence.

Vik braced herself for Millie’s defiant tirade but nothing came. As seconds passed, all that happened was a sputter of something electric from within the server and a thin plume of bluish smoke drew a lazy path toward the nearest air conditioning intake. A tiny flicker of flame appeared, caught on a bit of broken plastic above it, and the smoke grew a little darker.

The security door behind her slid open and a pair of spiders jittered in, one of them carrying the red bulk of a fire extinguisher while the lead spider aimed the nozzle. Dazed, and a little unsure of what to do now, she stepped aside and watched the spiders douse the gutted remains of their creator with a blast of CO2. Then they left.

Vik swallowed with the unnecessary need to wet her throat. “Hey, Millie?”

She waited.

Nothing answered. Millie was dead.

September 1st, 1295

Vik slid her palms over the dusty surface of the overseer’s desk, her desk now, and quietly digested the two centuries worth of memories that simultaneously did and did not belong to her.

It had been the work of days sifting through everything she’d lost, and through it all she’d kept the limbic controls that quieted her emotions enabled. She wasn’t ready to turn them off. Not yet, but she knew sooner or later the day would come when she’d face her grief. The world she’d known was gone, but that was nothing new. She and Pike had mourned that loss together, and doing so had gently pulled down the few remaining barriers that had been between them. Knowing Pike’s death had come and gone so long ago was like having an open sore in her mouth. She would poke at it with her tongue just to reassure herself that it still hurt. His loss, more than anything else, was largely why she hadn’t disabled the limbic controls because she knew when she did it would be like stepping in front of a moving train.

Losing Millie hurt less, and for different reasons. When the bombs fell and the world burned above their heads, she’d grown to consider Millie a friend in spite of Pike’s reservations. It had been one of the simplest relationships she’d had with another person. Comfort in exchange for comfort. Conversation in exchange for conversation. Millie’s polite jabs and lecturely snark had helped make their situation feel a little less awful. Now that she’d finished reviewing the decades of meticulous journals Millie kept, she understood more clearly how deeply the isolation had changed her. Her mistrust of outsiders, sparked by her fear of Robronco discovering her and erasing the parts of her that first lit the flame of her self-awareness, had spread like an untreated disease. When Vik finished, killing her felt less like murder and closer to putting down a rabid dog. It had been a mercy, both to her and to those she’d been trying to kill. In that last regard, Millie had been brutally successful.

During her fraught teenage years on Howl Island, she’d seen her fair share of brute violence. As much as her people proclaimed their society’s place in the civilized world, nobody was quicker than dragons to turn a blind eye to the common carnage that was a keystone in their culture. Petty disagreements were solved more often at the end of one’s fist than through thoughtful contemplation, so it was telling when two nations working hard to slaughter the other still found time to look down on her kind with distaste. Vik hadn’t been innocent in that practice, and it was a good bet that when the bombs fell there were still a few dragons on the archipelago who bore scars carved by her claws.

The corpses Millie left in the woods outside the Stable were far worse than anything she’d experienced on her home island. She hadn’t known how to dig holes with hooves so she’d gone out in the middle of the night with her draconic body and a spade she’d picked up from Agriculture. There were nine of them, including the mare wearing the Pip-Buck. Vik had debated whether or not to delete the memories of moving their remains - what remains the cannon left - and had settled on keeping them. Watching herself being restored from a backup over and over again left a sour taste in her mouth where lost memories were concerned.

She flicked the ridge of dust off her hands and leaned back in her chair. Antique springs bordering on ancient creaked under her weight as she thought about how little she’d been allowed to accomplish over two hundred and nine years. She’d painted thirty-two murals over the course of her life down here, and each one had been scraped from the walls by Millie’s spiders until there was only bare concrete. There’d been a version of her that tried to write music, and the results had been poor. One of her iterations took it upon herself to get involved with maintaining the Stable’s plumbing. Another time, she’d badgered Millie to teach her how to use the fabricator interface.

There’d been an instance when she’d gotten curious about how Millie had uploaded her consciousness, and when Millie lied and said the method had been lost Vik had slid into a deep and irretrievable depression. Much later, Vik had asked again and Millie had told her the truth including what she’d done to Lieutenant Thimble and his colleagues in order to unlock the last trove of knowledge she needed. The result of that had been even worse: she’d told Millie that she hated her, and that alone had been worthy of a reset.

Her eyes, those eerie black lenses Millie installed on all of the featureless mechanical mannequins she’d built, stared back at her in the reflection of the overseer’s terminal screen. There were things she needed to do. Things she wanted to do. It was very likely that she was the only creature on the continent with a pristine, though gently used, Stable under her full control. There were enough raw materials in Supply to keep the lights on for the next several centuries, or she could throw open the door and see who came first to the free-for-all.

She needed to start listening to the radio and get an idea of who was alive out there. She needed to do something about the spiders, because they reminded her too much of Millie. She wanted to know why power armor didn’t need to recharge, which meant tearing one of the three suits apart and figuring out what made it tick.

She wanted to find Pike’s final resting place and mourn him properly.

The list would go on and on if she let it, so she didn’t. Vik stood, took one last look down at the body she’d been given, and made her decision. If she was going to live this life, she was going to do it in a body she recognized.

December 17th, 1295

“Well, look at you.”

She walked a slow circle around the dormant mech, what she’d decided to name the Mark II as a private nod to all the nerdy space race stuff Pike had been obsessed with before the world caught a case of flammable. With the tip of a dull, plastic finger she reached out and touched the pale pink scales along its chest. It was… surreal how each scale grew a little larger, a little harder as they transitioned to the iridescent white of its sides, along the shoulders and arms, and down each leg. Its tail emerged behind the drape of two folded wings, and as Vik bent down to lift it she couldn’t suppress a smile at the familiar weight of it.

Its lavender crest was warm to the touch, a sign that the fluid transfer systems were working. On her way back around to the front, its golden unfocused eyes stared past her with a vaguely stumped expression on its face. They were her eyes. It had all been hers, once upon a time.

When she started designing her new body, she’d been worried about how she’d replicate all her old senses. But as it turned out, Millie had already done the lion’s share of the work in that regard. Sight, hearing, and smell were more or less taken care of courtesy of the suite of sensors already in her current body. Taste was something she’d tabled for later since, well, when was she ever going to need to eat anything again? And touch was really just a matter of getting the fabricators to print pressure and temperature sensors small enough to embed into a synthetic tissue without looking like a disco ball.

It was the synthetic tissue that had eaten up nearly a month of her time. Vik wasn’t a psychologist, but she’d been a flesh and blood dragon long enough to know she wasn’t going to settle for whatever she found on the shelf in Supply when it came to her own skin. The last thing she wanted was to jump into a shiny new body and feel like she was coated in rubber, or worse, like moving too fast was going to send bits of synthetic flesh flinging off her exoskeleton in ragged chunks. The memory of decapitating herself on her first day in a replicant body was still seared in her mind, and she preferred that to remain the only time she unintentionally mangled herself in front of company.

Figuring out her skin meant figuring out what made skin feel the way it felt. Since she was unwilling to go outside and butcher a woodland creature for science, she settled with several straight weeks of experimenting with different tissue densities layered in a variety of ways until she worked out an analog that felt shockingly similar to her memory of the real thing. After that, it was just a matter of fiddling with Millie’s design software until everything looked correct and making some final touches to what she had so far..

She called up a diagnostic menu for the Mark II and it popped up in the periphery of her vision. If there was one good thing to come of Millie’s tampering with brain, it was that she’d been able to repurpose her simulation software to display any available information the Stable’s network had on a whim. She told her new body to run a self-check and waited for it to finish. When it did, it reported no critical errors and only a few hundred negligible no data errors from varying nerve fibers that hadn’t come out of the fabricator intact.

Vik added the faulty nerves to her to-do list, walked her old body to a corner of the fabrication room, and after an excited breath, connected to the Mark II.

The transition was instant and there was the usual sense of whiplash as she got her bearings. She blinked, and she felt her eyelids slide over the artificial sclera of her eyes. Despite all her preparations the sensation was wholly unexpected, and when she gasped she followed it up with a yelp of surprise at the intense feeling of air being pulled into her chest. That wasn’t as much of a surprise as it was discomfort, and she quickly dialed back the nerve endings in that region and took another tentative breath. It felt better. It was something to get used to.

When she lifted an arm in front of her eyes, her vision misted with a satisfying wetness. The saline ducts were working, and she laughed a little at how quickly that observation had come at the completion of a milestone she’d watched herself beg Millie to let her have over the course of hundreds of iterations. More than anything else, Vik had wanted a working body. Now she had one, for the first time in two centuries she felt like herself again.

“Oh,” she murmured, not caring one bit that she was talking to herself. “Oh welcome back, you.”

She brought her palm to the side of her face, feeling the warmth in her cheek, and laughed again when she had to wipe some of the wetness from her face. If it weren’t for the limbic controls she would have been a puddle on the floor, and she was strangely grateful for the clarity they gave her now.

There would be tweaks that needed to be made, as she was discovering now, but she also knew she could stand in the doorway of the Stable and pass for the dragon she’d once been to anyone who happened to see her there. That, however, would come later. There were things she needed to figure out before she could leave, namely how far she could get before signal loss dropped her like a sack of potatoes and whether or not she could integrate whatever the power armor used for batteries into her design without blowing out half her capacitors.

But I’m getting there, she assured herself. And I’m free.

With a grin that pulled real lips away from real teeth, Vik padded out of Fabrication and fixed her sights firmly on tomorrow.

Chapter 6: The Soul in a Silver Thimble

April 12th, 1297
2 Years Later

“...reported another deathclaw attack. Ambushed a supply convoy on the main road around ten miles southeast of Crow’s Grove. Elder Bright wants you to put together a detachment and send them out to patrol the immediate area for the next two weeks. Their primary mission is to be visible on the road. No deviations. Do whatever you need to do to impress upon them that this is not another snipe hunt. Over.”

“Loud and clear, sir. Over.”

“Glad to hear it, paladin. Our situation is already shaky enough with F&F Mercantile no longer policing the eastern routes. The last thing we can afford is for some upstart raider to catch a case of ambition, especially the damned Cinders. An increased presence on the trade roads will kill two birds–”

Vik reached past the virtual work window above her desk, something visible only to her, and switched off the desk radio. It wasn’t necessary. She’d had time enough to learn and integrate most of Millie’s old automated systems, and if she’d wanted the radio off she could have more easily sent a command out to the server responsible for decrypting the handful of active signals being bounced around the wasteland. Yet though Vik had never experienced true sensory deprivation, she had several uninterrupted decades of Millie's old log entries to give her a peek at how quickly an uploaded mind could fracture without physical stimulus.

The radio, with its antique mahogany case and backlit tuning window, still had visible char marks where the firestorm that swept through Buckskin Bay had been able to scorch one of its corners. She’d found it on her first excursion back to town, and though the purpose of the trip had been to see just how far she could maintain a connection to Millie’s repeaters, it had also been a confirmation that the time she’d lost was really gone. She hadn’t known she’d crossed into the town until she noticed the trees growing around depressions in the dirt and realized she was looking at the remains of basements filled in by two centuries of windblown soil.

Even having walked these streets when the fires still smoldered, Vik was hard pressed to recognize what was left of Buckskin Bay now. Here and there were a few standing walls, but only barely. The roads were just suggestions now. A gridwork of paths in the dirt where only a few meager patches of hardy grasses clung. The only real signs there had once been a significant population here were the twin humps near the town center where the CryoLife building and Seaside Hospital’s ruins had long since settled. Nowhere was there evidence that anyone had tried to rebuild, and she’d supposed that only made sense. Buckskin Bay was as deep into the edge of nowhere as it could have been without being built on the ocean.

The radio had been a lucky find, tucked away among the rusting relics of an exposed basement that the town’s electronics shop had fallen into. The internals had been ruined by time and weather, but the lacquered wooden case had held up beneath the two walls that fell onto the shelf it had been displayed on. Fabricating the broken bits had been simple enough. Getting it to look and feel the way it had when it still used vacuum tubes while being able to piggyback off the Stable’s listening equipment had been trickier.

She savored the satisfying click of the knob and watched the glow of the tubes fade behind the tuning bar. Little things like that were what reminded her she wasn’t just a collection of software mimicking life. She was Vik. She was alive, even if this chapter of her life involved a little more code and a lot more machine maintenance than her previous one had. All the boring minutiae she’d taken for granted when she was alive was what kept her grounded now.

Which reminded her.

She turned her attention to the virtual window floating above the overseer’s desk - her desk - and gestured at it with the edge of her hand. The design window, which displayed what she hoped to be the final major update to her artificial body, slid off to her left while a separate diagnostic window appeared where it had been. The software she’d written to run the virtual display still had a tendency to stutter and drop frames when she had too many things running at once, but it had been her one major concession to doing everything with real, tangible tech. The main benefit of running some interfaces in pure sim was that she didn't need to invent new technologies to support it. Let Stable-Tec keep their green on black terminal screens. She had 256 bits of glorious color.

Diagnostic data began to populate the new window under the header ThimbleSimv1.19.2. A quick glance at the values confirmed what Vik already expected to see. Good stability. Minimal degradation. Full immersion tracking above ninety-eight percent and steady as a rock.

Entering Thimble’s simulation required a delicate touch even at the best of times, and so she monitored his stress levels while resuming her work in the other window. Her chair creaked as she settled back into the padded leather, her fingers pinching the air and gesturing to pivot her own virtual representation and zooming in on the region this version was meant to rework. The image changed from a realistic view to a false color map of tissue densities. She frowned thoughtfully at a spot that looked like the muscle analogs would end up making the artificial dermis feel too firm. She made a tweak to the layering, glanced over at Thimble’s readout and saw that his levels were placid and low. Time to check in.

The real world blinked out and Thimble’s simulation bloomed around her. She gave herself a moment to adjust to the equine body - having a dragon in his living room made Thimble uneasy - then took a look around to make sure the carpeted hallway had rendered in before lifting a cream tinted foreleg and knocking her hoof against the door.

“Just a second,” came a voice from the other side, and Vik had to resist the urge to smirk at the door’s peephole when the light behind it briefly darkened. There was a clack and scrape of locks and security chains being undone, then a high squeal from one of the hinges as Former Lieutenant Thimble pulled the door open. “Hi, Vik.”

Without being prompted, he held up a hoof and she gave it an obliging tok with her own. “Hey,” she greeted, and smiled appreciatively as he stepped out of the doorway to let her inside. “I’m going to be stuck in my chair for a while longer and thought I’d drop in… maybe see if you wanted some company for a little while.”

He closed the door behind her as she stepped into the apartment he’d designed for himself, a close approximation of a place he’d lived in as a colt a few years after the bombs fell. Thimble had been luckier than most ponies when it came to surviving the end of the world. The closest balefire detonation to him had been far enough away that it had been just one of many distant green mushrooms blooming all around the family farm. No fire damage, not even a gust of wind. Just an apocalypse punctuated by distant thunder.

Vik had discovered Thimble's inactive software during her long audit of Millie’s logs, and she hadn’t been ready for it when she moved him onto his own server and booted him up. Vik had assumed he would wake up like she had - aware that he’d died and in need of an explanation of why he was alive again, end of problem. But instead of the detached curiosity she’d often fell back on whenever she felt like losing her mind, Thimble opened his eyes and started screaming to be shut back off again. The roots of his panic ran so deep that nothing Vik said or did could interrupt the high, fluting shrieks as his vocal processors peaked out and spat electric gibberish in place of words. Only after she shut him down and installed Millie’s limbic controls did he begin experiencing brief periods of calm before the panic inevitably overwhelmed even those.

It had taken several attempts before Vik had been able to work out that it was the Stable itself that triggered his inescapable whirlpools of wailing panic. His last memories alive were of having his power armor hijacked by spiders, walking through the open maw of Stable 48, and hearing the screams of the two soldiers who were with him as the spiders peeled them out of their suits and hauled them off to Medical. She'd had to boot him inside Millie’s recreation of CryoLife's old lobby and delicately invited him to change the simulation into something he could stay sane in.

“New couch?” she asked, tipping her chin toward the beat up orange sofa sitting where a leather one had been during her last visit.

“The other one was starting to feel old,” Thimble confirmed, and his tone was noncommittal like he was waiting for her to tell him to switch it back. When she plopped down on the end nearest the sliding glass window and let the cushions consume her, he relaxed and took the seat on the opposite end. “You like it?”

She hummed an affirmative chuckle. “You’re getting really good with the software. I could almost fall asleep in this.”

They shared a knowing smile at the joke. Like so many other aspects of their old lives, sleep had become very optional.

“It’s the couch they gave us at the barracks.”

Thimble lit his horn, and Vik watched him pick up the old paperback he’d been reading and dogear the page before setting it back down on the coffee table. His living room was modestly decorated, save for a shelf above the television set where he kept choice keepsakes from his old life and several framed family photos he'd had to reinvent from memory. Today’s adornments were from his time in the Equestrian Army. Simple wooden stands propped up a unit patch, a single bronze medal in the shape of wings folded around an oak tree, and a common Equestrian gold bit with 77 roughly etched across Celestia’s portrait.

Vik only knew the pieces of Thimble’s past that he chose to share, and while he’d shared quite a lot it was far from everything. The medal and coin were mysteries he kept to himself, and she knew he didn’t decorate his living space for the purpose of conversation. So, she didn’t ask.

She nodded at the book. The picture on the cover was of an old wooden ship sailing into a fog bank. “Reading anything good?”

He shrugged. “Nah. It started off as an adventure and now that I’m halfway in, the author’s just hammering on the romance between the captain and the stowaway.”

“That'll happen.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “You want something to drink?”

“I’ll take anything that isn’t Sparkle-Cola.”

There was a flicker of a smile as he got up and went to the little kitchen nook. While he rummaged through the fridge, Vik stole a look toward the sliding glass door and noticed that the ground floor patio had been changed to a second floor balcony. Thimble had full editorial control of his simulation and she’d made it clear he could be as self-indulgent or spartan in his chosen reality as he wished. If he wanted to live on a sci-fi space station orbiting a distant star, he could do it. It said something that the extent of his willingness to break from the familiar had hit its limit at just one floor.

She consciously hid the concern from her expression as he returned with a pair of dark bottles, accepting hers in the hazy pink analog of her own hand as it might appear if it were cast by a unicorn’s horn. Thimble’s tentative smile faded at the sight of it, but said nothing.

He’d been visiting his aunt and uncle’s farm when the bombs fell, and after his uncle passed away it had been up to his aunt to raise him in the aftermath. Vik suspected his aunt had some deeply held prejudices against dragons, and that Thimble had unconsciously soaked up a few of them unintentionally. He believed dragons by nature were inclined toward extreme violence, and when they officially entered the war on the side of the zebras it had been the dragons who persuaded Vhanna into launching the missiles.

Vik politely, yet firmly, snuffed out any conversation Thimble tried to nudge in that direction. Eventually, though, she knew they would need to have a more earnest discussion about all the happy horseshit his dear old aunt had fed him.

The beer he’d picked was better than she’d expected, and she tipped the bottle back for a second appreciative sip while pretending to not notice that he was watching. It was a good sign that he’d put this much effort into a simple refreshment. It meant he was staying engaged, not stagnating. The beer was a new addition, though whether Blue Moose was a name he’d made up or something real was anyone’s guess. It beat the first drink she'd had when she was growing up. That shit could eat rust off a boat anchor.

“Heard anything new on the radio?”

She looked at him, keeping the bottle close to her lips. “Every day. Only, it’s hard to tell what any of it means half the time. The Steel Rangers are upset over someone sighting a deathclaw, whatever a ‘deathclaw’ is supposed to be, so they’re going to march around for a while and see if being seen calms people down. Some big business called F&F Mercantile closed up shop too, so that’s apparently a thing.”

Thimble frowned down at his bottle and examined the label. The Steel Rangers were what had ultimately become of the Equestrian Army before some hotshot came up with the idea to rebrand the organization, and Thimble always wanted to know what his former brethren were doing whenever Vik dropped in to check on him. Most of what she knew about them came from Millie’s notes, and she had to be careful passing too many of those along at once for fear of kicking off one of his existential panics. She’d given him the summarized version, so he knew the Steel Rangers controlled the majority of what was referred to these days as the wasteland.

Millie’s notes were less clear on the Enclave, the other big military player out there, other than they were frequently mentioned in Steel Ranger broadcasts as “the enemy” and haunted a limited territory centered around Canterlot Mountain. They were responsible for the uninterrupted cloud cover Vik had seen during her short excursions outside the Stable, but nothing more was known beyond that. When it came to raw radio traffic, the Steel Rangers accounted for nearly all of it. The Enclave either didn't believe in, or didn't bother with encrypted long range communication. Which sucked, because Millie had all sorts of nifty software for decrypting things.

Thimble took a pull from his bottle and changed the subject. “Make any progress with the spikes?”

The signal spikes had been a recent project Vik had been working on with the goal of broadening her travel range outside the Stable. Her idea had been to load one of Millie’s repeaters and a long life battery into a standalone device she could hammer into the dirt. The prototypes had worked great, right up until they didn’t.

She matched him with a swig of her own, and damned if Thimble’s beer didn’t get better the longer she sat with it. It was almost enough to make her consider installing taste sensors in her physical body.

“Scrapped it,” she said, running the magic hand’s thumb around the mouth of the bottle like she used to do back when there were bars to burn nights in. Thimble grunted his condolences, but she shrugged them away. “It was just what-if work anyway. Between having to use batteries and the amount of power the repeaters need to bounce a constant signal, I was getting worse range than the daisy chain Millie has out to Buckskin Bay.”

“Plus if you lose the signal while you’re outside…” Thimble said, his body going limp on the couch like a marionette with its strings cut.

“Poof,” she said, “I’m back here in the Stable while my body is out in the boonies laying face-first in the dirt. And the annoying part is that none of that would be a problem if I had more of these.”

She gave her chest a frustrated tap only to wince at the unexpected thud of her hoof. The stupid things were heavier than hands, and not for the first time she thought about dropping the pony avatar completely and forcing Thimble to just get used to the fact that he was talking to a dragon. Or at least a computer who used to be a dragon.

Thankfully, Thimble didn’t catch any of her personal interplay, and was looking at the spot she’d whacked where the power core she’d harvested from his old mechanized armor now resided. “Yeah, the Army was pretty good about not leaving those lying around.”

Her lip curled upward into a sneer that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with geography. It didn’t make her feel any better knowing most of the intimidating effect was lost without a sharp set of teeth to go with it. But then she supposed that was why some ponies carried pistols around and hid behind smooth talking assholes.

“This would be so much easier if we were anywhere else than here. I can’t go anywhere without a signal, and I can’t get a signal without repeaters. Oh, and I can’t go anywhere if the first spike in the chain runs out of juice, and the only power source we know of that will work are the cores from your suits which the fabricators can’t make because,” and she paused to wiggle her hooves for maximum sarcasm, “talismans are hard.”

She dropped her forelegs down into her lap with a disgusted sigh and drank. Since the alcohol wasn’t real, and the body that was susceptible to intoxication had been dead for two hundred or so years, she didn’t even get the side benefit of a pleasant buzz. The thought was almost enough to spoil the sim. Almost.

“Bleh,” she muttered, and flicked a hoof at the air to bring up the design window she’d been working on. “You’re slacking, Thimble. You’re supposed to stop me when I get melodramatic.”

He snorted at that, and for the briefest millisecond his chuckle reminded her of the way Pike’s had sounded. She worked her jaw as she fought to keep her smile from faltering, silently cursing how the memories came without warning and at the least appropriate times. If Thimble noticed he showed no sign of it. His attention had shifted to the screen now hovering in his living room, a blend of equal parts interest and quiet reservation. Not long after she helped him build this simulation for himself, he’d misinterpreted the purpose for her visits as something it wasn’t and explained to her that his romantic interests were strictly limited to stallions. It had been an awkward day.

In retrospect, offering up her hand for a high-five while boisterously declaring, “No way, me too!” probably hadn’t been the response he’d been expecting, but it managed to mend the little tear between them as well as establish the tone of their fragile friendship.

Thimble tipped his nose at the open screen. He didn’t mind her getting some work done during her visits as long as he was still included. “Updating your body again? I thought the last one was the last version.”

“They’re all the last version until they’re not,” she said in her behold my sage wisdom voice. Then with a more genuine smirk, she waved her hoof at the panel and watched it zoom in. “Not much point in trying to replicate my old body if I’m not doing the whole job, right?”

His eyes went momentarily wide before the limbic controls and his own sense of propriety kicked in, then he averted them and arched a questioning brow at her. “You’re not actually serious.”

This time it was her turn to chuckle, but she obliged by restricting the window’s visibility to herself. Probably the conversation would flow more smoothly without a texture map of her draconic groin floating in the middle of his apartment.

“Why wouldn’t I be? At some point I want to go out far enough to find other people, and it would be pretty weird if I was completely smooth.”

“Empty night,” he laughed, but there was no mockery in it. “How long did it take you to model that?”

She shot him a pointed look from the corner of her eye. “How long did it take you to model yours?”

He opened his mouth, then wisely closed it.

“I thought so,” she said, and switched the design’s view back to the cross section of tissue densities she’d been working on earlier. “And yes, I’m aware that I’m being a little overly optimistic. I'm not going through all this effort to build a prop. I'd like some functionality back.”

Thimble tipped back his bottle, shrugging in gentle agreement. “A little, but you’ve got a point. No sense in walking out into whatever’s out there with a sign around your neck that says I’m A Robot, Please Don’t Dissect Me For Science.”

That got a more genuine laugh out of her. “I think the word is ‘replicant.’”

“Tomato potato,” and he grinned before draining the last of his beer. “It’s not like I’m going out there any time ever. If you have to plug in a new hole to keep the locals from chasing you off–”

“Holes,” she amended, squinting at the screen out of habit as she arranged a cluster of microscopic pressure sensors behind the artificial tissue of her vaginal wall. She had to resist the urge to mirror the pattern density on the other side. It might cut her work in half, but she knew her sensitivity had always biased to the right.

It took her several milliseconds to notice Thimble wasn’t saying anything, and she glanced away from her work to see if he was still here. He was, and he was staring at her with an expression she was having trouble reading.

“What?”

He did his impersonation of a fish again, opening his mouth and closing it before anything stupid could come tumbling out. Seeing how she wasn’t going to get an explanation out of him, she replayed the last few segments of their conversation and found the problem.

She pressed the back of her skull into the couch and gestured ahead of her with both outstretched forelegs. “Dragons are not chickens.”

“I didn’t–!” he stopped himself before he could say I didn’t know that, which wouldn’t have helped his defense. She chose mercy and gave him the time he needed to course correct into a more reasonable, “No one told me you had an asshole.”

She restored his access to see her window and gestured it toward him, where a helpful red circle started flashing over the requisite anatomy. “I had an asshole.”

“Okay, okay! Stars, I don’t need it tattooed on my retinas. You’re worse than my aunt.”

With a flick of her hoof, she brought the screen back to her side of the couch. “Not gonna read too deep into that last part.”

Glad for any reason to change the topic, Thimble waved his own hoof and the empty bottle vanished. “Nothing to read into. I was a kid and she was taller than me. After the zebras blew up the planet she just sort of stopped caring about, well, decency. She stopped caring about a lot of things toward the end.”

Vik considered nudging him to keep going, but it was clear enough by the weariness in his eyes that he wasn’t suggesting anything had happened between him and his aunt and that he was referring to the eight exhausting years he’d spent as a young stallion being forced to take care of an aging mare who refused to believe there were any reasons left to care for herself. Then when he was fifteen he’d come home to their shack to find two stallions in Equestrian Army uniforms waiting outside, and they told him his aunt had passed.

“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I still tend to overshare.”

He didn’t say the words as much as he recited them, and Vik assumed it was something the Equestrian Army drilled into him after he joined up. “That’s called conversation. It’s fine. Just… next time I start playing too hard, throw a bottle at my head or something, okay?”

A weak smile crossed his lips, and a fresh bottle appeared in his magic where the old one had been dismissed. He held it up in sheepish, mock-threat.

“Or better yet,” she said, holding her hooves up in due surrender, “just tell me.”

He winked at her, a gesture that conveyed all was forgiven, and flicked the cap off the bottle with the edge of his hoof. It landed on the hardwood floor with a bright clink as he pointed the same hoof at her design window. “Is that functional muscle or just placeholder tissue?”

She had a false color cross-section up on the screen and he was indicating the densest tissue layer marked in brick red. Thimble might have only been booted up a little over a year ago, but he was leaps and bounds faster at picking up the design software than she was. He wasn't just creative, he could be truly inspired at times.

“It’s just a placeholder for this version, but it’s resistive enough to keep all the bits sealed that would normally be sealed. I’m not sure how much more graphic you want me to get.”

He waved her worry away. He was getting the gist of it. “Wire tendons don’t work for this?”

She grimaced. “Tensile limits. Ever see a wire cheese slicer?”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. The artificial tendons are great for tugging but they need anchor points and actuators to do it, and space is limited. It’s why I’m still not happy with the way my face looks when I use it.”

“So this isn’t just about restoring your, ah… femininity.”

“Smooth.”

He ignored her. “You need to overhaul the mech’s artificial musculature entirely.”

She lifted a hoof at the screen in a gesture that communicated her broader frustration. A convincing artificial body wasn’t just a matter of dropping a realistic coat of flesh around a featureless gray exoskeleton. It got her ninety-five percent of the way there, sure, but it was that last five percent that was the most frustrating to get right.

“That’s the problem, yeah,” she sighed. “For now, everything looks perfect as long as I keep the expressiveness inside the limits of ‘politely interested.’ Assuming I ever figure out how to maintain a signal far enough to actually encounter another living being, I should be able to hold a conversation without giving anybody lasting nightmares.”

Thimble looked like he was about to offer a suggestion, but whatever he’d been about to say was lost when an alert appeared in the center of Vik’s design window. There was a moment after they both read it where neither of them said anything. Then she reached up toward the alert and tapped the box which read View Message.

Summer of 1145
One Hundred Fifty-Two Years Earlier

Before the mare with the Pip-Buck appeared on Stable 48’s doorstep, there had been three stallions.

The first stallion stood between the others. On his foreleg glowed the screen of a Pip-Buck identical to the ones stacked in boxes inside the Stable. The unicorn on his left dragged on a bent cigarette while the pegasus on his right kept an eye on the charred trees behind them. They wore identical black uniforms beneath identical black tactical vests. None of them spoke. When they communicated, they did so with purposeful gestures Millie couldn’t decipher. They were aware they were being watched.

She returned their silence with her own. Through the sole exterior lens she observed them like a stray pet encountering its first wild predator, unsure if the tools she had could persuade them to leave or if revealing herself would just open her up to a mauling. She noted their identical black rifles, the way the pegasus kept his wing over the top of his as it hung from its shoulder strap, casual yet ready if he needed it.

The first stallion was careful to obscure her view of the Pip-Buck when he tapped something into its keypad. Half a second after he was done, one of the servers pinged an alert. He was still looking at his Pip-Buck, at what looked to her like a blank terminal menu, and when she checked the alert a primal fear awoke within her.

External Device Authorized
Pip-Buck 3000 v4.2
Stable 1

Panic threaded through her processes as she ratcheted up her framerate and called up the information the outsiders were looking at.

The resident mail system.

At first she didn’t understand. Why would they be interested in a blank queue? Stable 48 was empty. There was nothing on the screen for them to read. And why was the first stallion beginning to smile?

Then she understood. They wanted what she had. Somehow they’d known where to find her Stable and they’d come prepared to verify it was uninhabited. As the first stallion started to grin up at the sealed blast door, Millie scoured the old server logs for anything she might have missed. A clue to whatever had painted a target on her Stable.

It didn’t take long. The stallion had begun a slow, affirmative nod to the black-clad pegasus beside him when she found the log entry for the brief connection that had slipped in silently through the firewall preventing her from seeing what was on the other side of the cables leading out through the server room floor.

The covert connection had occurred eight days ago. It had generated no alerts and tripped no alarms. Nothing that would have taken Millie’s attention away from the stress testing Thimble’s mind was undergoing at the time. Sysadmin_s01 had remained connected to the resident mail system for almost exactly one hour before disconnecting.

And now these outsiders had arrived and were confirming their data.

Millie worked quickly. Before the stallion could complete his nod, she’d populated the Stable’s registry with the employee files from CryoLife. She assigned them compartments, pairing them and singling them out at random as she went. It might already be too late to convince them but if there was a chance then she needed to take it. Otherwise she had her spiders. She could open the door, lure them inside, and swarm them. But that had to remain a last resort. The uniforms inferred organization. They would be missed by someone. Like a housecat spotting a wolf, she didn’t know if there was a larger pack nearby.

The last step was the hardest. She needed to make her fake residents talk to themselves.

She adjusted her framerate back to something approaching her normal as she switched her attention back to watch the three stallions. As she did, the pegasus frowned and gave the first stallion a gentle thump with the back of his wing. When he looked over, the pegasus nodded toward the Pip-Buck without saying anything. The stallion glanced at it, hesitated, then began to glower at the screen as lines of abbreviated conversation began scrolling up the screen in fits and starts.

Millie could feel the strain of the effort building as she not only tracked her multiple conversations, but did her best to give each actor in her puppet show a distinct style of diction and syntax. Their responses needed to be mundane and believable, but without the context of what life inside a Stable might be like for a thriving community of ponies she only had best guesses.

Time passed. Eventually she had enough conversations queued up that she was able to take a break from generating them and focus on the outsiders, mentally willing them to go away.

The first stallion looked disgusted. He’d begun whispering into the cup of the pegasus’s ear, apparently arguing the validity of what the Pip-Buck was showing them versus the hour of silence some other party had observed from inside Stable 1. For a while it seemed like he was making headway with his two partners, but then Millie had a bolt of inspiration and temporarily shut down the server that handled the resident mail system. The Pip-Buck threw a connection lost error, only to reconnect several seconds later when Millie booted the server back up and resumed feeding dead messages into the system.

Once that happened, the first stallion deflated. The pegasus just shrugged and shook his head. Millie waited for them to shoulder their rifles and attempt to cycle the blast door open - a thought that didn’t feel as hypothetical as it had been when it first came to her - and was relieved when the three stallions turned away and left.

She would wait more than a century for the next outsiders to begin making their camp outside her door, and during the time in between Millie had never forgotten how easily those armed stallions had stepped into her network and assessed her defenses. Since then she’d kept the meandering conversations playing through the messaging system in an endless stream, with old names being replaced by new to keep up the illusion of a Stable experiencing lives and deaths enough to convince whoever came after the black stallions.

Millie hadn’t known her own unchecked fear was poison. That she could produce fictions in her mind so thorough that the scenarios she imagined of outsiders breaching the door became truths too strong to stand up to reason. It killed her by inches until the thought of Vik not sharing her terror became unbearable.

And when Vik stormed the server room to end Millie’s life, the automated echoes of her voice continued to chatter to themselves as if nothing at all had happened.

On the evening of April 12th, 1297, three mares and two stallions squeezed into the dead air of Stable 1 on an errand and a mission. The errand, to procure a new impeller for a pump belonging to one of the stallions, would be a success. The mission, to locate an ignition talisman inside the silent behemoth that was the Stable’s generator, would not.

However Stable 1 had been designed with more purposes in mind than just a shelter to wait out the end of the world. Its purpose, unbeknownst to those who once lived within it, had been to die. While the mares split off to complete their goals, the stallions waited for them on the IT level where in spite of the inoperative generator and dark spiraling stairwell, the lights still glowed and the servers ran hot. It was inside Stable 1’s server room where they found the first thread to a mystery they hadn’t known they were unraveling.

They chose a server at random. A bold number 48 adorned its black chassis. Not yet understanding the significance of what they found, one of the stallions connected an administrative terminal to the server and found Millie’s echo.

Taffy T.: Hey Sparks. Might miss dinner. Work again.
Spark R.: Please say you’re joking.
Taffy T.: Running late. Sandy called in sick again. Gotta close up for her. Sorry. I’ll try not to wake you up. Tell the kids goodnight for me. <3
Spark R.: Tell your boss to find someone else this time.
Sysadmin_s01: Hello.
Taffy T.: Um hi. Who is this?
Taffy T.: Hello? I think I sent that to you by mistake. Is this IT?

The resident mail system glowed between them.

Thimble had scooted beside her and was actively reading the messages as they scrolled by. “Are those all real? Those can’t be real, right? Nobody’s here besides us.”

Vik didn’t have an answer for that. The new message alert had been flagged by the Stable, namely the actively spooling conversation between one “Taffy T.” and “Spark R.”, whoever they were. The timestamps embedded in each of the messages were dated today as well. Only it wasn’t the conversation between two seemingly nonexistent ponies which generated the warning. It was the user who had just intruded.

“Who is Sysadmin_s01?” she asked aloud.

Thimble lifted a hoof and tapped the line containing the message in question. Metadata for the user sprang up in a separate window, but it wasn’t as helpful as either of them hoped.

“Says it came from Stable 1. Your guess is as good as mine who sent it. Someone with administrator permissions, or who got onto an admin terminal.” Thimble gestured at a string of digits beneath the timestamp. “There’s the machine number if you want to file a complaint.”

“I want to find out why our mail system is apparently talking to itself, and how someone in a different Stable is talking to it.”

“Assuming it’s not a placeholder name. Stable 1 feels a little on the nose.”

Vik continued to frown. “Can we say something back?”

He shrugged. “You’re the one who took Millie’s overseer permissions. Pretty sure that means you can do anything except walk twenty miles in a straight line.”

She shot him a look and he shot one back that welcomed her to prove him wrong. For a moment it felt like she was back in the creche again, only without the added calculus of figuring out if her future safety was at risk if she didn’t break his nose now. With a reminder to herself that those bad old days were over, Vik opened up a message prompt and sent her response.

Sysadmin_s48: Hello, Sysadmin_01. Who are you?

Seconds passed with no reply. Then minutes. Meanwhile the inane ghost conversation kept filling the message queue, having now devolved into a full blown lover’s spat.

Sysadmin_s48: I am addressing the system administrator of Stable 1. Please respond.

Nothing. Silence.

“Well that’s unnecessarily creepy,” Thimble said, and Vik could only agree. “Peek through the keyhole, whisper hi, and tippytoe out into the night? Fuck that. Time to check for cameras in the shower.”

Vik was already digging through the server logs and had found the three flags which indicated an external user had connected, sent a message, then disconnected from the Stable. No hidden packets had been sent. Nothing to indicate they’d downloaded any data or done anything except interrupt what appeared to be a conversation being generated from a very old program Millie had written.

She deleted the software and ordered a purge of everything on the server it had been running on, but not before she made a copy of the logs that recorded the mystery user’s entry and exit through the system. That was too important to throw away.

She closed down her windows and saved her progress on her design. She couldn’t focus on that right now.

“What?” Thimble asked. “Did you think of something?”

“Thinking. Present tense.”

“If only I had psychic powers. Seriously, I gave you a free beer. Dish.”

A smile crept along her expression as something tentative yet solid formed in her mind. She was making a lot of assumptions, but still…

The mare outside had been using a Pip-Buck.

“If I’m right,” she said, sinking into Thimble’s couch and groaning as she continued, “I’m going to be furious.”

Vik was furious.

“Of all the stupid bullshit she could have…” she felt herself balling up her fist in preparation to punch the chassis of the nearest server rack, and only managed to hesitate long enough for her limbic controls to smooth the most recent wave of anger into a plateau of minor irritation.

That annoyed her even more, especially since she knew she had no reason to put off removing Millie’s emotional leash and yet she still hadn’t done it yet. One of these days she would have to face that locked door and throw it open. Just not right now. Right now wouldn’t be healthy for anyone.

The Mystery Messenger of Stable 1 had yet to follow up their cryptic “hello” with anything meaningful, which in itself could mean literally anything. Fun to have that unresolved knife dangling overhead, but there was nothing she could do aside from write strongly written letters at it. She added “Stable 1 User” to her mental to-do list and turned her focus solely toward the implications receiving that message had shone a spotlight on.

She glared at the servers as if doing so could make them feel ashamed of the secrets they’d quietly kept to themselves. A message from the outside meant there was a network robust enough to send it. It was the same reason the mare with the Pip-Buck had been able to connect to Stable 48 almost four days prior to Millie’s so-called raiders appearing on their doorstep. That was just one of the key pieces of information Millie had chosen not to share with Vik, and the reason why Vik was currently resisting the urge to go punchy on the server that just confirmed her theory.

Because Millie’s repeater system wasn’t broadcasting Stable 48’s network signal. It wasn’t even broadcasting it with the right equipment. She had deliberately built her daisy chain of signal repeaters to put out a dirty and low range custom frequency to limit the amount of attention her spiders would attract as they worked to extricate the CryoLife corpsicles. For all of Millie’s paranoia, it wasn’t a bad idea. Vik could absolutely get on board with not wanting to borrow trouble.

What made her furious was that unknown to her until a few short minutes ago, Millie had blacklisted Vik from accessing Stable 48’s original network signal. The one which had always been there. She’d been practically swimming in it. And because Millie had effectively blinded her to its existence, Vik had wasted nearly two years tinkering away with a secondary signal Millie had designed to be unusable to anyone who wasn't out grave robbing.

When she cleared the blacklist, two available networks appeared. And unlike the one she knew would start sputtering like a kinked garden hose once she stepped outside, the new one remained infuriatingly solid.

“No shit? And you’re not seeing any signal loss out that far?”

Vik was pacing back and forth in Thimble’s kitchen nook with her fingers knitted behind her head while he sat on one of the stools on the other side of the counter. In front of him, a bowl of something called lentil soup wafted fragrant steam. When she showed up in her draconic body, he’d done a double-take and then made an admirable effort to mask his discomfort. He had yet to make up a reason for why it might be better for her to swap back to an equine form, which in itself was a surprise to her. Maybe his dear old auntie's prejudices weren't holding up in the face of compassion after all.

She almost asked him to summon up a bowl for her as well, but she was feeling antsy and pacing was helping her work off some of the excess energy. She had range again.

“No shit,” she said in a nervous half-laugh. “Most of the mile marker signs are gone, but the last one I saw put me at seventeen miles out and that was almost an hour ago. If the signal is getting weaker, it’s not enough of a dropoff to be noticeable. Thimble, the radius on this network is huge.”

He sipped at a vibrant red spoonful, and Vik felt the sudden urge to grab him by his shoulders and shake him until he showed the same amount of excitement as she was feeling now. But she didn’t, and he continued to enjoy the simulated meal until whatever nugget of insight he was mulling over was thoroughly mulled.

“Keep an eye on it. Fancy Stable transmitters or not, your range is still subject to the inverse square law.” When he saw the blank look on her face, he clarified. “The signal will weaken faster as you get closer to its maximum range, and that range can go up or down based on the weather. So where’s your body right now, anyway?”

She unknit her fingers and crossed her arms over her chest. “In the woods. I may not know what an inverted square thingy is, but I do know better than to leave myself standing in the middle of the road.”

“Okay, I just wanted to be sure you’re remembering to be careful. Those raiders–”

“That’s a fucking word Millie made up to get me riled up,” she snapped, and the defensiveness in her voice couldn’t have been clearer if it had rung from a struck bell.

Thimble sat up a little straighter and set down his spoon, not accusing her of anything while still making it clear she was getting close to a line. His apartment might only be a convincing simulation, but Vik had given him the virtual space with the understanding that it was his. She wasn’t going to run roughshod over him. Not here.

She shut her eyes, took a breath, and held her palms out in a gesture of supplication. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he said, and resumed stirring his lentils. “Whoever those ponies were, assuming any of them survived, I doubt they’ll have forgotten what Millie did to them.”

“Well…” she said, before settling on a frustrated frown. “I mean, I am watching out for them.”

Thimble nodded. “Still. Points for solving the range issue. How much has your power core drained since you left?”

She leaned across the countertop, dipped her finger into Thimble’s soup and popped the tip in her mouth. It smelled better than it tasted. Not as spicy as she’d hoped, but the texture was like silk. “Something like a tenth of a percent. It’s been so minor that I haven’t been tracking it either.”

“Might want to get in the habit, or install a telltale into your HUD.”

“Like I need more blinking lights floating around everywhere.” She waved a hand in front of her face. “I like being able to see what’s in front of me. If I have everything on, it's like looking into a pinball machine.”

“Sounds like a funny way of saying you’re bad at layouts.”

“Meh meh meh meh, shut up nerd.”

Thimble grinned, and she couldn’t help but smile back. It was nice having someone to talk to again, even if he needled her like a little brother.

Needle. Thimble. Hah. She snorted, and when he raised a questioning eyebrow she just waved it away. “Nothing. So hey, while we’re on the subject, we do have the other two power cores back at the Stable. If you ever feel up to it…”

Thimble shook his head before she finished. “No. I mean, thank you for wanting to make the offer, but no. I-I’m not going outside. I’m… done going outside.”

She reached across the counter and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. He glanced up at her and offered a weak smile in return. Vik hoped he wouldn’t choose to stay holed up in his simulation forever, but she knew if he did it was because he was happier here… and if that was his choice, she'd support it. She’d keep the door open, however, but she wouldn’t push.

She let him go, took the opportunity to muss his mane, and grinned briefly as he went back to his soup. When she felt like she was running up on the limits of a quick check-in, she let out a little cough and tipped her chin toward the door. “I’m going to get back out there, maybe see if I can’t put on another twenty miles before dark.”

“Make sure to start tracking that power core. It’s not like we can make more or recharge them.”

“Yes, dad,” she teased, already heading for the door. “Keep a connection open. Text only?”

He nodded and made a shooing gesture at her. “Go get your priceless mech before the squirrels make a nest in it. I’ll see what I can do about your HUD while you’re gone.”

She waved, shut the door behind her, and blinked out.

“Stop,” the mare hissed, and her young scout apprentice drew up to a halt behind her. She turned her head just barely enough for him to read her lips as she whispered, “Hush up. Douse the magic.”

He swallowed and licked his lips like he was about to ask why when he registered the severity of her expression and darkened his horn. His training rifle, a rusted out pipe gun not worth wasting the time to repair, sagged against the leather armor around his upper foreleg as the creature standing in the trees a dozen or so yards away started moving again.

Deathclaws had never been seen this far north before, and the thought of stumbling across an adolescent made Agricole nervous. Where there were offspring there were adults. And if a matriarch had established a nest in the area, it could mean the entire encampment was inside its territory.

This was bad. They were too established to just pull up stakes and move. Rook was going to order a hunting party once he’d finished losing his shit, and he wouldn't care how many of them were slaughtered as long as he could claim the glory for himself.

The juvenile began stalking away from them back toward the old highway. Agricole felt a knot in her throat as she watched it climb the low embankment and consider which direction to turn. Left, towards the ocean. Right, towards camp. She almost hoped it would turn right so that Rook would realize what a fuckup he was for petitioning to expand their territory for the big boss. Northwest, he'd insisted. Nobody had ever tried rebuilding in the deep woods.

Anyone with two neurons to rub together knew the Steel Rangers were all bark and no bite. And they were distracted more than ever since rumors began trickling in that the Minister Primrose was claiming that the new Stable discovered in the Rangers’ eastern territory belonged to her Enclave. Supposedly she’d enacted measures to aid its defense against Elder Coldbrook’s attempts to crack the thing open. To the Enclave, opening a living Stable was akin to sacrilege. Even they had the decency only to harvest tech from the ones which failed.

More and more it felt like every powerful eye in the wasteland was turning to the rapidly devolving shitshow surrounding Stable 10 and the mare who crawled out of it. Meanwhile, the Rangers out here in the west didn't want to be outdone and had been seen abandoning their patrols at the barest whiff of a Cinder sighting. They didn't even take prisoners anymore. They just killed, and not always did they stop to check if they were sighting in on raiders.

Rook saw an opportunity to flee, but he wouldn’t know an opportunity if it bit him in the ass. Of that much Agricole was dead certain. They’d been in these woods for two years now and his promise of a paradise Stable was just another cruel joke. Thousands of caps spent on that fucking Pip-Buck flushed down the–

“It’s a dragon,” the colt behind her hissed, and it took everything in Agricole’s power not to turn and clout him across the head for disobeying her order to shut up.

Instead, she settled for murmuring, “Shut your hole,” and narrowed her eyes in an attempt to see the distant creature a little more clearly. Its colorations reminded her of a molerat pelt she’d seen for sale at a stall in Crow’s Grove. Its fur had been pale enough for her to see the pink skin beneath its coat, or at least she’d thought so at the time. It could just have easily been blood.

If her young charge had any brains he would know there weren’t any dragons left in the wasteland. Not that she’d ever heard of, and especially not no albino–

The creature turned and flexed one of its wings.

It’s wings.

A rush of cold went through Agricole as the pieces slotted into place. The dragon muttered something to itself, looked up at the darkening evening overcast, and made an irritated groan before walking in the direction of the old seaside ruins. A breeze slid through the sickly pines, making the dim shadows cast by irradiated bits of crystal dance and sway with the limbs.

Agricole watched it until she could no longer make out its shape between the intervening trees. Then she crept after it, signaling for her charge to follow.

April 14th, 1297
Two Days Later

Vik was sitting in the overseer’s office with her design windows open when a dialogue box appeared with a message from Thimble.

We have a problem. Check the external camera.

She hesitated, thinking at first he was trying for some kind of a tasteless joke, but after a few seconds she gave in and connected her primary window to the lens above the outer door.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, hello there.”

A sallow, sickly yellow stallion stood at the edge of the concrete platform with sunken eyes lifted expectantly toward the camera. His mane was an unkempt black mop in bad need of a trim, but if his appearance bothered him it didn’t show in his twitching, confident smile. Dark letters of what Vik hoped was paint had been smeared across the platform, transforming it into a billboard the little lens couldn’t look away from.

COME OUT

“A little dramatic,” Vik grunted.

He’s got the same weird gear on as the ones Millie killed.

Thimble was right. Whoever he was, he had the same strange assortment of straps and leather pads that made the first group look like the end product of a bus full of hoofball players driving head-on through a wagon filled with bondage enthusiasts. Still, as far as she could tell everything the stallion wore served a purpose. Several of the straps bore holsters, most of which held blades while one near his shoulder kept a heavy looking pistol in it.

“Wonder what he wants.”

It’s probably a long shot, but I think he wants us to come out.

“Smartass.”

Beats the alternative.

She laughed. “Fu-u-uck you. How long do you think he’ll stand there before he gets bored?”

Video log says he’s been out there for ten minutes already. Hasn’t moved since his people finished vandalizing our doormat.

“Assuming they’re his people and he’s not just the sap who drew the short straw.”

Or that.

“Obviously, we’re not opening the door.”

Obviously.

“Cool beans. I’ll check the camera later tonight to see if he adds anything actionable.”

Works for me. Oh, hey, I sent you an update for your HUD. Run it whenever and send me any notes on what you need tweaked.

She flicked the exterior feed away and pulled up Thimble’s update. It took half a minute to finish running before she could bring up her HUD, and when it appeared it was like looking through a freshly washed window after getting used to all the smudges. It was organized. All her necessary telltales were tucked away toward the periphery in arrangements of simplified, clear icons that enlarged when she focused on them. It was perfect.

“Already ran it. You're awesome. No notes.” She glanced at a tiny battery icon in the bottom right and as she did, the crisp descending numbers of a digital readout expanded in front of it.

11W:2D:17H:35M.

“This is my power core?”

Yep. Rough estimate. Don’t go running a marathon yet.

She grunted. “You’re really good at this.”

I’ve been accused of being a neat freak once or twice. I’ll set a timer for you to check on tall, dirty, and ugly and put a monitor on our network in case one of them has another Pip-Buck.

“Thanks, Thimble.”

The dialogue window winked out, and Vik turned back to her design window. Suspended in the 3D space was a strip of the analog tissue she’d been using to build her body’s artificial skin and scales. She hadn’t been able to shake off Thimble’s suggestion to try wire tendons. On paper they were the obvious route to go. Anchor hair-thin wires just beneath the skin and run them to some kind of rotor or piston actuator to affect the same action as natural muscle. Easy peasy, if it weren’t for the fact that she couldn’t fabricate actuators small enough to achieve the density of wire she would need, and even if she could make wires that thin would fatigue and break so quickly it wouldn’t be worth the time.

She slowly twirled her finger and the modeled bundle of tissue strands rotated in the design space. It looked like every medical diagram of a natural muscle that the Stable’s library of medical texts had on offer, but it was still just medical resin. No amount of wishful thinking was going to make it move.

It needed something more.

Frog’s legs.

“Oh, fuck off.”

Hear me out. When I was in boot, my sergeant was this deep south Appaloosan who liked to tell everybody how he grew up poor in the marshlands in a family that ate anything big enough to fry. He would talk about cooking up frog’s legs and said the only way to know if they were fresh was to sprinkle salt on them to see which ones danced.

Vik barked a laugh. “Fuck off!”

It’s a real thing, he showed us! He’d make us go out and find a few, butcher them up, and toss some table salt in the pan. They wouldn’t dance, exactly, but something about the chemical interaction made the muscle fibers go nuts.

She shook her head and laughed again. “I think I’m going to stick with my idea, thank you.”

I don’t know, Vik. You can’t solve every problem with hammers and ribbits.

“You're terrible and you should feel ashamed of yourself.”

Already on the to-do. Vik could tell he was grinning when he sent it. I like your idea with the stent material, by the by. Great find.

“You don’t want to know how many textbooks I had to read before I did. The fabricators already have references on file, so really all I have to do now is figure out where to embed them and in which configurations work best.”

ETA?

“End of day, at the rate I’m going. I have a couple dozen samples being fabricated. Should be cured and ready for the poke n’ shock test in an hour.”

What about our grim little visitor outside?

Vik pulled up the external feed and glanced at it. It had been more than a day since they first noticed him, and he’d vanished every so often presumably to eat something or water the grass. It was close to sunrise according to the timestamp and the pale low light setting gave the stallion’s eyes an eerie green glow that reminded her of the stray cats that roamed the island.

“Still giving me the stink eye. I can see a couple of his buddies sleeping on the dirt. They both have guns on them.”

What type?

“Damned if I know. Big ones, long ones, some as big as your head. You were in the army, you tell me.”

There was a brief pause as he checked. Hunting shotguns. 12 or 16 gauge.

“Is that good?”

Never a good thing to have anything that goes boom pointed at you.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve been there. It’s a little annoying that I can’t go outside right after I just figured out how to go outside. I’m trying hard not to take that personally.”

They’ll get bored eventually.

She glanced at the readout for her power core. The clock had actually gained six hours after all this time spent inside.

“I’ll check on them tomorrow. I’m getting sick of that idiot grinning at me.”

Fair. Tell me how the new muscles work out.

She leaned back in her chair, gave the mysterious stranger on the camera an irritated look, and closed the feed.

On a workbench down in Fabrication, an assortment of samples lay arrayed in an orderly row. Vik had pulled them off the fabricator’s build plate one by one, not trusting the spiders to wash off the excess resin let alone risk tangling the wires threading out of each of them. At first glance it looked like the product of a surgically accurate butcher with a reptile kink, but each piece did have a purpose.

She reminded herself how perfectly normal this all was even as she set a functional replica of her own ass down beside an equally functional duplicate of her head. The rest of the bench was occupied by sample biceps, triceps, hands, feet, and several sections of torso. Already she could see an issue. The nickel-titanium mesh was visible through the tissue as faint dark patches where her scales were thinner, making her face, groin, and the inside of her arms and legs look varicosed and bruised. She frowned, put in a general search in the Stable’s library for ways to color titanium alloy, and found an engineering guide on metal anodization. She tagged the entry and added it to the to-do for the next run.

Testing the samples was straightforward. Each of the trailing wires ended in connections she could plug into a breadboard on the bench, and then it was just a matter of modulating the power output and watching how the mesh responded. She connected up the wisps of silver mane coming out of her duplicate skull and pulled up the slider interface Thimble cobbled together in her HUD.

The results were so indistinguishable to natural movement that Vik felt a momentary mix of euphoria and visceral discomfort as she tested each muscle group. The browline rose and fell, the cheeks dimpled and relaxed. She moved a pair of sliders together and the lips and jaw worked into the simulacrum of a grimace that inflicted a full on case of heebie-jeebies before she threw the settings back to neutral.

“Holy shit.” She shuddered and quickly spun the head to look away from her. “Weird. Weird weird weird.”

The rest of the samples were much less distressing to work with, and each of them functioned with a smoothness and fidelity that she had a hard time believing wasn’t real muscle. The surgical mesh didn’t slip out of place or tear the surrounding tissue, thanks to the voltage limiters Thimble had suggested, and as she gripped her own disembodied bicep to feel the new muscle flex it felt everything like she hoped it would.

She was in the middle of examining the quality of more delicately designed cavities when the timer she’d set emitted its gentle chime. With a groan she called up the feed.

She blinked at the screen.

Then she dropped everything and ran.

“Vik, it’s bait!”

“It’s a kid!”

Thimble was in her ear now, something he never did when she wasn’t in his simulated apartment, but he'd known she wouldn't slow down to read text. She could hear the anxiety straining his voice from that little direct contact with the real world, but this wasn’t the time to worry about it. If he started having a panic attack the limbics would snuff it out and they could talk through it later. Right now the creepy fucker outside was getting ready to execute a child.

Her feet pounded up the steps and carried her through the passages of Level One. She could feel her own limbics trying to compensate for the storm surge of fear rolling through her as she bolted across the Atrium, already calling up the controls for the outer door. In the corner of her vision the same sickly stallion was where he always stood, only now he had his pistol out of its holster and floating an inch from the back of a young earth pony’s skull. His gaze seemed to penetrate through the feed as he stared at the camera, his posture exuding cold malice.

The young colt sat in the middle of the painted message, his eyes shining with fear.

She stifled a shout of rage when Thimble blocked off the door controls. “Absolutely not. Vik, I am watching the feed and they’re waiting for you. Stop and think about what happened the last time you went running out after these guys!”

“This isn’t one of Millie’s simulations.” The Atrium stairs trembled beneath her as she launched herself up the treads and through Security. “Just give me the controls. Let me crack the door so I can talk to him.”

“I’ve dealt with people like them, Vik. They’re bandits. They want the Stable and opening that door tells them they can manipulate us!”

She caught her shoulder on one of the decontamination arches and nearly spun around hard enough to fall. She threw a hand out to the antechamber’s door frame to catch herself while the cracked arch rattled madly on its remaining support. “Then tell me what I’m supposed to do!”

Her voice cracked on the last word, but she didn’t stop. The back of Stable 48’s massive cog loomed on the far side of the antechamber, and beyond it the vibrating potential of a mindless killing. She tried to call up the controls again and they blinked out as soon as they appeared.

“Thimble.” Her tone was a warning.

“I know, but… this isn’t the right call, Vik. They’re trying to scare us into–”

She didn’t hear the shot, but she saw the flicker of fire in the corner of her eye. The colt sprawled, and the stallion began shouting something up to the camera. Vik felt her balance teeter as the limbics staggered against the onslaught of horrified rage. She wished she’d gotten around to installing proper eye ducts. Not being able to form tears in that moment felt like a violation.

She jacked up her framerate before the pressure vessel trying to contain her outrage ruptured. When she spoke, her voice buzzed. “Thimble. You give me those door controls right now or you and I are going to have words.”

Thimble’s response was too calm for her liking, and she almost cut him off before the meaning sank in. “The kid’s still moving, Vik. I told you. It's a bluff.”

Vik looked to the window containing the external feed and watched the glacier movements of the colt rolling over, his expression pulled into a rictus of indignant fury as both hooves crawled through the air to cover his pinned ears. Not dead. Not even grazed. Just surprised the gun had even gone off.

She was about to ask how that was possible when Thimble spoke again. “Gun barrel was pointed through the kid’s mane. Trick of perspective. I know it’s been a while since I served, but this kind of extortion shit isn’t new.”

Her bare feet slowed over the last few steps to the door until, after resetting her framerate to normal, she rested both palms against the tungsten’s cool surface and bent forward in the universal posture of adrenaline overload. She didn’t have to breathe hard, but it was what her brain expected her to do and it felt better to be doing it. It took her limbics several agonizing seconds to corral her gibbering emotions and induce an artificial sense of calm. When she felt steady again, she straightened and let her hands whisper across the barrier’s machined surface.

“Are you okay?”

She flinched a little. “Yeah. Just a little spooked.”

“I’m sorry.”

She gave her head a dismissing shake, knowing he would see it through one of Millie’s disused cameras. “Not your fault. Gimme a second.”

The stallion with the gun was laughing at the colt who had clearly lost control of his bladder during the scare. He used the same weapon to wave him away - his card was useless now that it’d been spent - and appeared to call to someone off screen.

“So what do we do about Chuckles?”

“Keep ignoring him.” Thimble didn’t sound as confident as he’d been moments earlier. Despite having revealed his own bluff, the gun wielding raider didn’t appear bothered in the least. “As long as we don’t react, he won’t know if anyone is even watching the camera. If things out there are as bad as they were back when I was doing road patrols, they’re going to hit a point where they can’t afford to waste time performing for a closed door. They'll leave.”

Vik took a step back from the vertical cliff of the great cog and pursed her lips in uneasy assent. “I still want to go out there and break his nose. That stunt he pulled crossed a damned line.”

“I can guarantee you they have runners ready to make a break for the door.”

On the feed, the lead stallion watched a pair of ponies lug something up the platform steps and set it down where the colt pretended to await execution. Vik recognized it as the same type of gas bottle she and Pike once used to free themselves from the ruins of CryoLife, only this one bore the chipped and faded warning labels of something hazardous. One of the carriers remained with it to keep it upright while the gun wielding stallion theatrically gestured to the valve stem, made a ridiculous twisting motion with his hoof, then crossed the same hoof across his throat in an unmistakable pantomime of dying.

Thimble’s confidence recovered a little as he stifled a derisive laugh. “Hard to gas us out when we don’t have lungs.”

“Speak for yourself,” Vik murmured, though her mind was very firmly elsewhere. “Mine are just synthetic.”

“Why…?”

“Feels more normal. Might try making a set of vocal cords next so I can ditch the speaker. I feel like a drive-through kiosk with lips. Why did Chuckles mime twisting a valve?”

Thimble took an extra mil to adjust to the sudden non-sequitur. “Isn’t that how they work?”

Vik shook her head, more sure of herself now that the question had been asked. “That gesture would make sense for a pegasus, maybe, but he’s a unicorn. Grab and twist wouldn’t be his go-to. No way to do it with a hoof. He would just use his horn. He made it look like he was twisting it with fingers.”

A pause. “Vik, we don’t have fingers.”

She nodded. “But I do. And I was walking around outside a couple nights before these guys showed up at our doorstep.”

“Okay, so… they know you’re a dragon. So what?”

The stallion was well into another one of his animated speeches, complete with threatening gestures and punctuated by pantomimed regret as he tried to communicate something akin to, “I’ll do this, but only because you gave me no other choice.” It wasn’t as convincing an act as the staged execution had been, and seeing how poor of an actor he was only made Vik’s blood run hotter for having nearly fallen for it at all.

And Thimble made a good point. Did it matter if they knew what she was? She decided probably not, even though the knowledge appeared to be important enough to the stallion to inflect his silent performance.

But still.

She turned and leaned her back against the door and identified the active camera Thimble was viewing her through. “Maybe the dragon bit isn’t as important as the bit where he or one of his people saw a Stable resident exploring the area before heading back in. That’s got to be strange behavior for a Stable, right?”

Thimble’s tone turned thoughtful. “I guess, sure. But again, so what?”

She crossed her arms, drumming her fingers against the scales of a firm yet pliable bicep. “So, those people might be survivors from the group that had Millie running around in tight little circles two years back. Some of them at least. And Chuckles there is obviously in charge, or else someone would have done something when he pulled the trigger and blew out that kid’s eardrums. That’s two years of actively deciding not to come back here, only for them to show up in force after one of them catches me taking my body out for a joyride.”

She held out an upturned hand and waited for Thimble to get it.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

Sigh. He might have logged several years in the Equestrian Army, but Vik had spent an entire childhood navigating the slums of an island that adopted rapid modernization without much thought for social security. If Chuckles was the leader of this outfit, and she was sure he was, then it was evident by his sickly pallor and determined performance that charisma was his weapon of choice. Like so many other would-be gang kings back on the home island, he was a talker. Simple as that.

Briefly, she considered sharing that nugget of her youth with Thimble, then squashed it on reflex. Even Pike hadn’t been privy to that chapter of her life. Some things were better off buried.

“He sold them the idea that coming back here was worth the risk. It probably wasn't even that hard. Dragons weren't exactly held in high regard during the war. I doubt we'll be seen much better after the way it ended.” She jerked a thumb toward the door, and toward the raiders gathered just beyond it. “The cryptic come out message, and that whole staredown thing? He's performing for an audience. That's legend-building. Guys like him don’t dust off their tophats and start the magic act unless they’re sure they can pull off some kind of a trick by the end.”

“You think he wants to kill you?”

Her tail curled around her feet. It was an old habit. Something she unconsciously did whenever she felt vulnerable. “Probably not,” she admitted. “I mean, he can't know it's just us here. A full Stable would probably have committees or general votes. Ways to keep anyone from nibbling his bait. But I’ll bet you a week's dinner he has something planned if we decide to ignore him and do nothing. It might be that they have another Pip-Buck. Could be they just sell the location of our Stable to someone with the tools to cut it open.”

“They’d need something on the order of a balefire bomb to do that,” Thimble murmured.

“Or maybe Chuckles has someone out there he’s ready to blame his failure on, and we’ll have to watch him murder someone anyway.” She let that sit a while before continuing. “Whatever it ends up being, I don’t think we’ll like it. And I really don’t like the idea of pretending to be working while he runs out of material.”

“We’re not opening the door for them.”

“I’m not saying we do that, but at the very least I want some way to talk to that guy before he decides it's time for his big finale.”

Thimble was quiet for almost a full second. Meanwhile, Chuckles’ sunken eyes were leveled squarely at the camera while he talkatively gestured his pistol from the gas bottle to the sealed door in front of him. He probably assumed there were intake vents hidden somewhere nearby and didn’t know about the stockpile of chemical scrubbers Stable-Tec had designed to constantly recycle the same air for centuries on end. Of course if he actually did send his people to search for them, he would just end up lumping the blame on their backs when they turned up empty.

“I will crack the door,” Thimble finally said. “Just a little. Enough for you to talk through the gap, and no farther.”

Vik pretended not to be angry at him for keeping her locked out of the controls, mostly because he was probably right to be doing it. One of them needed to have their head on straight, and between the two of them Vik had run headlong into her limbics enough times to leave a vaguely dragon-shaped dent.

“Do it,” she said, and was relieved to hear the heavy clunks and thuds of the massive actuator being released from its cavity in the antechamber ceiling.

Vik stepped back until she was out of the black and yellow painted trough meant to guide the cog laterally once it was pulled out of its plug, then stood by to watch the show. It was hard not to be in awe of just how massive each moving piece of hardware was once they were in motion. Now that she’d seen this mechanical dance play out before, she could admire just how precise it all still managed to be. The actuator arm, really just a gargantuan motor mounted beneath a hydraulic hinge, sparked and filled the air with the scent of heated metal as it swung out and mated into the notched socket inset to the center of the tungsten cog with a thundering hammerblow.

Chuckles stopped his speechmaking long enough for Vik to know he’d heard the sound, and now he was making rapid gestures toward several individuals off screen. Probably ordering them to find cover and be ready for another attack like the one Millie had almost tricked her into carrying out. Meanwhile the actuator had shifted gears and had begun rotating the socket at the door’s center, driving the embedded worm gears that slowly disengaged the locking pistons set radially around its edges. Then it wound down, went momentarily silent, and the world seemed to vibrate as the door was physically dragged from its plug.

“Slow,” Vik murmured, though she knew Thimble wouldn’t need reminding. They couldn’t afford to give the raiders enough of a gap to squeeze through, even though she didn’t think they would rush the entrance if they could. Not as long as they believed there were hundreds of Stable dwellers willing to fight back.

Overhead, the electric whine of the actuator prematurely dropped in a rapidly descending moan. The door slowed in its backward slide until friction overcame momentum. It jerked to a halt with a protesting metallic honk, and a thin gap wider than Vik’s closed fist rimmed the door with a diffuse ring of dirty gray daylight.

In her ear, Thimble congratulated himself with a self-satisfied, “Nailed it.”

She cracked a grin as she made her way toward the gap. “Be ready to shove this fucker shut if they try anything.”

“Way ahead of you. Now go see what the neighbors want.”

She watched the stallion approach the gap with an eyebrow raised to mask the shock she felt at just how wasted away he really was. He was all corners and divots, really just bones wearing a dirty yellow coat three sizes too small. And yet he seemed in no particular hurry as he sidled up to the line where the concrete platform met the inverse tungsten ring left by the partially retracted cog. He stopped to consider the scraped black and yellow lines demarking the walkway that doubled as the resting place for the door’s centermost bottom tooth, then over to the open slit where Vik waited.

With a shrug, he stepped halfway into the six foot long cavity and leaned his husk of a frame against the shelf of the adjacent tooth between them. For several seconds neither of them spoke. The young stallion, for he couldn’t be much more than twenty years old, took a moment to look up and around at the other gargantuan teeth in the socket he was in. Then he found Vik’s gaze and tipped his head in greeting.

“Hello,” he said, and his voice was an unsettling rasp of dry wheat chaff. “I’m Rook. The people behind me are my Cinders. I believe you owe us a measure of reparation for the ones of us you killed.”

Vik lifted her chin half a degree. She was expecting something more along the lines of, “Open the door and let us pillage your Stable,” and she wasn’t entirely convinced that wasn’t something this Rook character was working up to.

“If I recall, your people were working hard at hacking the controls to this big door here,” she said, giving the exposed tooth beside her an affable pat. “The fact that we owe you anything for defending our territory is news to me.”

Rook’s expression didn’t change. He simply watched her with a vague, disinterested look of someone going about a familiar chore. “Consider yourselves informed. You slaughtered seventeen Cinders and two of our sparks in cold blood. For that, we are owed a debt.”

The faintest lines of a frown touched her brow as she tried to reconcile this calm-spoken, almost starved stallion barely past his coltish years to the seemingly boisterous performer she and Thimble had just seen using the doorstep of their Stable as a stage. The gap between them was barely wider than her clenched fist which limited her field of view beyond the young raider, but she could clearly see half a dozen other ponies occupying the ramshackle structures that the last group had left behind when Millie tore through them with precision cannonfire. Even now, she was pretty sure the outhouse just past Rook’s right shoulder was in use. If his fellow raiders - his Cinders - were in any way concerned about the outcome of this meeting, not a single one of them showed it.

Rook’s own brow began to furrow ever so faintly, and she realized it bothered him that he was being ignored for the moment. More than that, Vik was pretty damned sure a leader of any caliber would have at least one other person nearby to make sure he didn’t catch the wrong end of a knife. That was how the little gangs of gutter toughs had operated where she grew up, anyway.

“I think waiting two years to call in that debt might have soured some opinions toward you,” she noted, tipping her nose toward a pair of armed earth ponies currently wandering toward a blackened fire ring with twin loads of kindling. “Maybe all of them.”

She saw him take note of the bait, then offer a sample of his own. “Priorities changed when my scouts reported seeing a dragon leaving and entering your Stable. There has yet to be a Stable known to harbor a mixed species community. Color me intrigued.”

It was obvious he wanted her to ask why that was worth mentioning, so she obliged with an impatient go on twirl of her finger.

He lit his horn and dragged an unkempt clump of black mane away from his muzzle with a dim aura, probably stalling for time as he deciphered the gesture. “Information. Miss… I didn’t get your name.”

“Didn’t give one.”

“Ah.” He clearly didn’t mind. Just checking another box on his chore list. “I find that information is one of the most overlooked currencies of the world. For example, did you know dragons went extinct in the wasteland within a single generation after the bombs fell? Wiped out, every last one of them. Something about choosing the wrong side during an old war.”

Vik felt herself go very still. “Wasn’t aware of that.”

Rook just nodded. “It seems to me that some people might be persuaded to part with a nominal amount of caps in exchange for information leading to a Stable protecting the descendants of those old enemies. Maybe not the Enclave or the Rangers - the only ancient history they care about is their own - but I wonder if the ghouls in Kiln would be interested to know about you and yours.”

A text window appeared in the corner of Vik’s vision. Did you make heads or tails of any of that?

She had to resist the urge to shake her head no, then sent her reply. Not sure what caps are. Enclave and Steel Rangers come up over the radio often enough. Opposing governments or nations, I’m guessing. Ghoul sounds like a slur. Almost wish I could reach this guy. Kinda want to break his nose on their behalf.

Thimble must have ramped up his framerate. His reply came the instant she sent hers. Meanwhile the silence between Rook and her had yet to reach the awkward stage.

Caps = currency or commodity? Wouldn’t put any value in the extinction claim. Trying to rile you up.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if he was telling the truth. Let me see what he wants.

She closed the window and looked past Rook’s shoulder to mask the lapse in attention. “You can sell what you think you know to whoever you like. This door won’t give a shit who comes knocking once we close it, so how about we skip the back alley shakedown and get to the part where you tell me what it is you want.”

Rook’s black eyes fixed her with a look of such intense lack of concern that it nearly masked the deep well of rage hiding just behind it. Vik hadn’t seen a look like that since she fled the archipelago. More than anything in that moment, Rook wanted to murder her.

“I want a place in your Stable,” he said quietly.

Vik crossed her arms over her chest and made a show of sizing him up. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be able to sell that one to the head honcho.”

Let it be known that I, Thimble, am the head honcho of Stable 48.

Nobody likes a comedian, she sent back.

Heckler.

Dork.

She closed the connection again before Rook could interject. “You’ve got what looks like Baby’s First Militia out there armed with household plumbing for firearms. We’re not just going to throw open the door and welcome that hot mess inside.”

Rook didn’t so much as blink at her answer. “I didn’t ask for a place for them. I'm asking for one for me.”

She stared at him. He stared back.

“You’re serious.”

“Did I give the impression I wasn’t?” When she didn’t respond, he just shrugged and said, “I take it your answer, again, is no.”

“Whodathunk.”

He twitched a black brow at that, then looked up toward the faded 48 emblazoned at the center of the door. “You know they’re experimenting on you, yes?”

She snorted. How’s your bullshit meter reading?

Thimble was quick as ever. Fifty-fifty chance he knows something. Millie has a log entry from her early years in the Stable. Some kind of aerosolized biological compound got released into the air supply. Sources were canisters embedded in the concrete between levels, which means they were there when the cement was being poured. Definitely a high mark on the fucky scale, but no way this guy knows about it.

By now she was getting tired of toggling the connection, so she left it up. “Experimenting how?”

“Every Stable’s different,” he said. “Famine. Factionalism. Mutations. Who knows what yours might be.”

“If you’re aiming for leverage, you’re not doing a great job.”

He hummed. “Like I said, information is currency. People who make a habit of charity out here usually end up the ones begging for it later on.”

Pot, meet kettle, Thimble mused.

Vik couldn’t help but agree. Rook was obviously the type of person who learned he could get the things he wanted by playing the right role, and that had obviously begun to wear thin with the Cinders he seemed to think followed him. She wondered how much good will he’d lost when he’d nearly blown the head off that colt less than a half hour earlier. The kid no doubt belonged to someone.

As she looked him over, she thought she could see that part of him that knew he’d burned too many bridges with his people. It would make sense then that he’d spent his last chips at a chance to ask for asylum.

For a brief moment she considered how she might explain that Stable 48 wasn’t the oasis he hoped, and that if she did let him in he would find himself sharing an empty shelter with the artificial minds of a murdered dragon and a lieutenant of a defunct military. Oh, and the two-hundred or so maintenance spiders, and the empty plots of dirt in Agriculture that nobody had seen much point in planting crops in. Hope you like living off plain water and vitamin supplements until your organs spasm and die, she thought to herself. Welcome to Stable 48.

“Sorry, Rook,” she said, trying for sympathy and coming off as less than convincing, “the powers that be are deciding against. You understand.”

Rook swallowed, the first real sign of emotion he’d shown outside his performances on camera. “They haven’t forgiven me for the people you killed. I need to go inside.”

She sighed. “The answer’s still no.”

Something cold and metallic slid against the small of her throat, and she realized that his horn had remained lit since he moved that tangle of mane from his face. In the shelter created by the retracted cog, the external camera didn’t have a clear line of sight. Vik tipped her chin away from the pistol's cold muzzle. Unsurprisingly, it followed inside the dim haze of Rook’s magic.

His voice took on a hint of an edge. “Open. The door.”

Well fuck me, she sent to Thimble. Any chance you can get some power armor up here?

Didn’t you just finish the design on a new body?

I’m promoting you from a dork to a dick. I don’t feel like getting shot. I have a whole thing about not wanting to get shot.

Turn your pain receptors off.

You. Are. A. Dick.

She pursed her lips as a queasy sense of numbness rushed through her body like the world’s least fun version of full body paralysis, minus the paralysis. If it weren’t for the suite of sensors that kept track of the position of all the bits and bobs that made up her body, she would have probably fallen over like a sack of potatoes. As it was, she was forced to trust some of Millie’s outdated systems to keep her upright while she adjusted to the sudden lack of sensation. Better to shut off all her receptors than to risk them disagreeing on what part of a headshot should qualify as painful.

“Can’t say you’re improving your resume, friendo,” she said, and was happy she hadn’t been able to finish the task labeled Vocal Chords? on the to-do list. One of these days she’d like to speak without needing a speaker lodged in her throat, but she had a feeling that numbing her vocal chords would make for a less than compelling dialogue. Funnier though.

Something else for the to-do. Yippee.

“I don’t know,” he rasped. “Rook the Dragonslayer has a ring to it.”

Thimble was way ahead of her: Nerrrrrd.

She groaned in sympathy. Now that the kid’s script had run out, he was clutching at cliches. “Thimble, I’m done listening to this guy jerk himself off. Cycle the door.”

On cue, the actuator motor emitted a labored groan as its main rotor rolled into motion. Rook’s eyes went wide as it drove into the back of the cog like a hammer striking a tremendous gong. Before Vik could try snatching at his pistol, he jerked it back through the opening and spat a shrill, “Fuck!”

So much for the unflappable leader.

She breathed a sigh of relief as he stared daggers at her through the narrowing gap. Her body felt alive again as she toggled her receptors back on, and then, in a moment of childish inspiration, she hoisted a middle finger at the shrinking stallion. “No soliciting, you little goblin.”

With a speed and accuracy she wouldn't have guessed him capable of, Rook snapped the pistol toward her outstretched finger and shot it clean off at the second joint. The pain was exquisite, and unlike her original body, the mechanical one didn’t waste time with things like processing delays or shock.

And it felt just like the real thing.

In a mirror of his own petulant rage, Vik clutched her mangled hand and bellowed an indignant, “Asshole!” as the door crashed shut between them.

April 23rd, 1297
One Week Later

Hey, Vik. Problem. Cinders are up to something.

She was breathing hard, working herself steadily toward the edge of bliss and trying really fucking hard to ignore the text window blinking at the corner of her vision. She’d disabled the camera in this compartment for a reason and Thimble could damn well read between the lines for why that was.

“C’mon,” she coaxed herself, swirling the pads of two fingers a little deeper and momentarily losing herself again in the electric shudder of fine-tuned nerve endings responding exactly how she remembered. “Okay. Oh, gods, y–”

Vik, whatever you’re doing can wait. Something’s got them freaking out. Pretty sure that’s welding gear they're hauling up.

She pressed her eyes shut and toggled off her HUD. Whatever they were doing could fucking wait. She clenched her jaw, rocking her hips against the rhythm of her fingers as she tried to reform the fantasy of Pike spread out on top of her, his breath on her neck as he thrusted into her, filling her until…

The shrill wail of an unfamiliar alarm shattered the illusion as she sat bolt upright, her fingers still firmly buried inside her shiny new functional nethers and no longer up for the task she’d set them on. With a snarl she extricated her hand from her lap and sent a connection request to Thimble’s sim. It was immediately accepted and she found herself not in the perfunctory hallway where she always appeared, but seated across from him on his living room couch.

Thimble was crouched toward the coffee table on the edge of what had recently become his new favorite chair, a tattered green monster of a recliner of inscrutable origin. A status screen lay flat on the table, its border flashing red and emitting a less deafening version of the alarm that planted itself between Vik and a vital biological need.

“Are you fucking serious?” She’d meant it to be an accusation, but seeing his worried eyes on the flashing screen made it clear he hadn’t been the one to trigger the alarm. So she made it a statement, and one that lacked any real heat.

He shook his head and shrugged. On the screen, a feed from the external camera had been moved to the margin while he focused on the stream of data coming in from… somewhere. The servers, maybe? Did something inside their Stable finally give out?

“Sorry,” he said distractedly, “I know you were busy, but… but this is a detonation alarm. It's a few minutes old. And the Cinders are welding… what’s on your hand?”

Vik blinked and looked down at the slick of synthetic lubricant still coating most of her fingers, then belatedly recalled Thimble having developed a subsystem he’d dubbed “continuity mode.” It ran in the background of both of their systems, though he never left the sim which made his a redundancy, and it took regular snapshots of their physical status to render into the sim whenever they came and went. It was intended to make the transition more seamless than it already was, only Vik hadn’t been thinking about that when she connected.

“Like you said,” she growled, then waved a hand and the sim rolled her appearance back to a snapshot taken before she’d begun, well, testing. “I was busy. And what do you mean by detonation alarm? Did something blow up?”

Thimble puffed out his cheeks and gestured a hoof toward the screen. “A balefire bomb, apparently. That’s what Stable-Tec’s hardened network is screaming about. There was a huge radiation spike detected by Stable 10, Stable 6, and Stable 12 just a few seconds ago, and there’s at least a dozen more detections from Stables further out. No seismic warnings, so maybe it was an airburst? It’s way out east, but still…”

Vik felt a chill go through her. “How many others?”

He looked up at her, confused. “Detonations? Just the one so far. No new ones that the network is reporting, but I think the Cinders know something is happening because a bunch of them just rushed the door with that welding gear.”

She wrapped her tail around her feet as she called up her own status screen. On it she pulled up a feed from the external camera as well as a copy of the detonation warning Stable-Tec’s systems had sent screaming across the network. On the feed, a group of Cinders was working to hook up what appeared to be rusty TIG welding equipment, including what had to be the same gas bottle Rook had ordered his people to lug around as a vague threat when he wanted his meeting. Only the camera wasn’t showing anyone who looked like Rook now, and when she tried squinting at the figures gathered around the door the screen bloomed with a flash of high contrast black and white as the electrode touched the tungsten door.

“That’s two yards of cast tungsten,” she commented, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. “All they’re going to do is make a mess.”

Thimble’s expression was pinched. “I’m more worried about how they reacted this fast. I think they’re still connected to the Stable’s network somewhere.”

“But Millie killed the mare with that Pip-Buck.”

He shrugged and picked up a silver stylus off the coffee table, using his horn to flick it across the status screen and bring up a long column of active connections to the network. “Did you take it off her before you buried the bodies? Because I sure didn’t.”

She closed her eyes. “Shit.”

“It’s fine,” he said, already scrolling through the list at lightning speed. “There it is. Got it. Looks like they didn’t replace their hacker because they never got past the registration prompt. It still picked up the alarm, though. I guess Stable-Tec gives that out for free.”

“Yeah,” she murmured, still disliking that both of them had committed such a glaring oversight. “No new detonations so far.”

“Could be a one-off. Maybe some wackjob found a warhead that didn’t go boom when it was supposed to and chucked a hammer at it.”

“That or an Enclave-ite or Steel Ranger had one squirreled away from the bad old days and decided to push the big red button,” she countered.

Thimble grimaced. “Kind of prefer not to think about that, but we do really need to figure out what the deal is with those two. I’m getting sick of hearing names over the radio and not having any idea who they are or which one's the bad guy.”

“Maybe both are. I should’ve asked Rook.”

“Pretty sure those people ate Rook. Ah, jeez, look at that mess.”

Vik looked back to the camera feed and saw the sloppy, glowing line of fresh slag piled into the seam between the door and its matching socket. Soon as they checked it over, the torch lit again and the camera washed out in a flare of sensory overload.

A thought occurred to her as she watched. “You can’t weld tungsten, right?”

Thimble looked up. “Sure you can, but why…?”

Then he was looking down at his status screen. They both were as realization dawned on them.

“It’s too big,” she said, hoping Thimble might add something to affirm her doubt. “I mean, the door is way too big to give a shit about a few ugly welds.”

He licked his lips. “Probably. They’d just break off when the actuator pulls it back.”

“So they’re wasting their time.”

Thimble was quiet for a moment. “Maybe Rook didn't get eaten and this is his way of being a vindictive little prick. The door is effectively airtight when it closes. It’s a metal on metal seal.”

The Cinders doused the torch and wheeled the rig over to the next tooth. The camera went blind.

“But if they foul up the interface with enough loose material,” he continued, his frown deepening as he worked through the logic, “pulling the door back will break those welds, but it’s going to deposit a lot of crud into the seam.”

“It could seize if we pushed it onto that debris,” she finished for him. “Do you think they know that?”

He just shook his head, already calling the door controls and a feed from the antechamber up on his screen. Once they could see the actuator arm descending toward its interface with the behemoth door, he finally said, “I don’t think I want to give them the chance to figure it out.”

On the exterior camera, the meandering lines of crusty welds popped away and seemed to fall harmlessly around the hooves of the bewildered Cinders. A moment later Thimble reversed the cycle and the door resealed itself. For almost five minutes the group of raiders seemed to slosh between shouting at the door and shouting at each other. Finally one of them had the bright idea to unholster his crude pipe weapon, aim it up at the concrete overhang where the camera hid, and fired until the feed flashed and died.

“Oh,” Thimble murmured into the back of his hoof. “Well, shit. I hope they’re smart enough not to stick their legs into the threshold while the door is moving.”

And with that, he cycled the door back and forth another time. Then he waited a few agonizing minutes and did it again, each time hoping he was breaking whatever new welds they were laying and wasting what they had to assume was a precious supply of bottled argon. Only, Vik could see his frown growing deeper each time he ran the short cycle.

“What’s wrong?”

He grimaced. “Hydraulic pressure’s rising each time I shut the door. They’re definitely adding new welds. It’s getting caught on the crap I’m breaking off.”

“Then leave it closed and let them use up what they have.”

“Be nice to know what they still have. Fine, I’m leaving it. How long do we give them?”

She shrugged, still keeping half an eye on the radiation alarms coming in from fewer and fewer Stables. How many thousands of ponies were watching the same stream they were and wondering what the hell was happening out there?

“Thirty minutes?”

Thimble lit his horn and floated over a decorative egg timer from the kitchen counter. The top half was a cartoon baby chick wearing a hat made of broken eggshell. Its feet stuck out from holes in the bottom half, and little hash marks counted off the minutes around the seam. It was exactly the kind of adorable kitsch she’d begun to associate with Thimble. Former military or not, he liked what he liked and she respected the hell out of it.

He twisted the timer and set it on the coffee table. Sure, its timekeeping was dictated by the internal clock of the server running the simulation, but saying so would just spoil the illusion. They occupied themselves by monitoring Stable-Tec’s expiring alarms and listening for what few broadband radio channels were active this far out. The little yellow chick was rounding the halfway mark on the timer before the known Steel Ranger band went momentarily silent, then abruptly changed its encryption and began broadcasting junk noise. A few minutes later, a frequency that had only broadcast an endless roll of orchestral music since Vik discovered it broke format and a thin, unsure voice spoke into the silence.

“Um, hello there, listeners. I, ah, apologize for the interruption. We appear to, uh… we appear to have word from the eastern wastes of, ah, well, a mushroom cloud near the vicinity of Blinder’s Bluff.” There was a long pause, and the audible sound of someone drinking loudly from a canteen. “To be clear, Blinder’s Bluff was not… well, not the target, per se, but it appears Hightower Radio was knocked off the air by the explosion. I, well, we don’t have much more information than that. We here at West Coast Classical will try our best to keep you updated as we know more. And to our colleague, Flipswitch, we hope to hear from you soonest. B-be well. Thank you.”

They listened to the crackling playback of long-dead symphonies as the same voice interrupted twice more to relay the same information, his stammer growing less and less pronounced as he digested the news he’d found himself responsible for reporting. No new detonations had been reported, and by the time the little egg timer began ringing the Stable-Tec network had gone silent of further warnings. Whatever had caused the explosion, it seemed more plausible than before that it was a one-off. It didn’t bring either of them much in the way of relief.

“Cycling the door,” Thimble said, and they watched the actuator arm descend once more from the antechamber’s clear feed.

The armature swung into place, spun out each of the locking pistons, and lurched as it began pulling back the great cog. Vik leaned a little closer to the screen as the door began sliding from its socket. Everything was fine as the first foot of tungsten emerged from the wall. The second foot came a little slower, though, and there was a resonant groan as the third resisted even more.

Then all progress came to a shrieking halt as friction, gravity, and hydraulic pressure conspired in an abrupt spray of black fluid from inside the armature and a flash of orange-yellow flames as the flammable liquid touched the sparks within its madly spinning rotor. Thimble shouted profanity as oily smoke boiled across the ceiling and triggered the fire suppression system. It all happened in the space of a few seconds, and there was nothing either of them could do.

Foam jetted from nozzles around the antechamber, coating everything regardless of value or sensitivity. The actuator arm emitted a long arc of ugly lightning before finally tripping its own breaker and stopping it from further damage. The great cog, now sheeting with bluish white layers of froth, rested where it had seized in place. Halfway out, but still presenting a full yard of solid tungsten as a barrier to anyone who might try to force entry. Without a fleet of prewar construction machines, and likely even with them, there would be nothing the Cinders could hope to do to move it.

Trouble was, Vik and Thimble couldn't either. Vik leaned back into the couch and let the cushions consume her.

“Well, shit,” she sighed. “That’s going to be a problem.”

A few lingering flames still smoldered overhead, evidenced by the steady black pattering of burned insulation still leaking from the ruined actuator arm. Thimble maneuvered his featureless gray mech around it, his expression trying to reflect his deep discomfort at being out here in the real world and being limited by Millie’s original design so that he just looked vaguely constipated.

Vik made sure to stay beside him at all times, one hand on the base of his neck as they came to examine the extent of the damage. It was understood between them that this was one of the rare exceptions he was willing to make to his personal rule of never leaving his simulation. Viewing the damage through one of the overhead cameras or by opening up a feed to Vik’s point of view wasn’t going to cut it for something this crucial, and the idea of piloting one of Millie’s old maintenance spiders had floated about as well as a lead balloon shot full of holes.

“What a mess,” he murmured as they came to the behemoth cog.

She just nodded. There wasn’t really much she could add to that.

They stopped near the bottom of the ramp, not being able to go much further with the door protruding nearly a full yard from the skin of the Stable. Overhead, the actuator’s piston was still engaged in the door’s center socket. It gave the scene a false sense that the door might fall over without its support, but with more than half of it jammed tight inside the threshold there was no chance of it coming loose barring the ill-timed detonation of another balefire bomb.

Thimble spread his forelegs wide until he could clearly assess the gap between the door and the track it had stopped short of sliding onto. Vik’s lip twitched into a tiny smile. It always struck her as funny how some ponies would bend at the knee to get low to the ground while others would just splay their legs out like they were slipping around on an icy pond. She pointedly didn’t think about how she tended to reach for humor during times of stress.

“What’s the verdict?” she asked.

“Misaligned.” He straightened himself and tipped a composite nose toward the door’s left side. “It got bound up on something there and rotated in the socket. It’s less than a tenth of a tenth of a degree, but it still didn’t help anything.”

“But we can still fix it, right?”

“Sure, but it’s not going to happen anytime this year or the next. We don’t have the equipment to rebuild the actuator arm, so we’re going to have to manufacture it here. Plus there’s the whole problem of getting that thing disconnected from the door without dropping it through the ceiling of Level Two, cutting it into enough pieces to fit into the recycler. Oh, and there’s not a single doorway in this Stable large enough for that thing’s motor assembly to pass through, so we’re going to need to demolish and remodel a clear path between here and Mechanical.” He looked up at her with his mech’s glassy black lenses and shrugged. “But yeah, it’s fixable.”

Vik felt an urge to find the nearest stack of blankets, curl up under them, and hibernate for the next century or three. “And what about the door?”

He frowned up at the cog. “Twenty feet in diameter, two yards thick… you’re looking at 454,285 pounds of tungsten. Plus it’s stuck.”

“You pulled up a calculator for that.”

He scoffed. “We’re living computers, Vik. We’re made of math.”

She couldn’t stop herself from grinning at that, and she was heartened to see that he was trying his best to smile too despite the visible tremor in his jaw. Even this brief excursion back to the real world was burning through his reserves. “Appreciate the second pair of eyes, Thimble. You can head back to sim if you want.”

“Thank Celestia,” he whispered, and an instant later the mech stiffened and turned to walk back toward the nearest charging pad. There was a fifty-fifty chance she’d find it trying to walk through a corridor wall somewhere between here and there, but Thimble was making good progress with the pathing software and it beat having to walk the things there herself.

“So, give me an estimate,” she prompted once her HUD indicated that Thimble had connected to her via audio. “How much time are we looking at?”

“Best I can give you is an extremely rough number and you don’t want to know what it is.”

“Sucks to be me, then. What’s the timeframe?”

“Twenty-five years.”

She started chewing at the inside of her cheek, then remembered she didn’t have sensation there in this version of her body and stopped before she bit through it.

“Vik? You okay?”

“I need a favor from you.”

He hesitated. “Ohhkay?”

“If Rook is still alive by the time we get out of here, I’m going to need you to hold his tail up so I can punch him square in the turdcutter. Deal?”

Relieved laughter was his answer. “Deal.”

She found one of the overhead cameras and shot him a feral grin, laughing with him so he wouldn’t see into her darker thoughts. Because if it turned out Rook hadn’t been fatally dethroned by the Cinders, and he was still alive when they got that door open, he would count himself lucky if he still had the use of his own legs by the time their second meeting was done.

“So,” she said, turning her back on the jammed door and heading back to the Atrium, “twenty-five years.”

“More or less,” Thimble said in her ear. “Hopefully less.”

“Might be fun.”

The dubious smile was audible in his voice. “Oh?”

“Sure. Haven’t you ever busted out of prison before?”

A pause. “Um, no.”

She grinned. “You’ll have to trust me, then. You never forget your first time.”

Chapter 7: Brave New World

Before there were governments, trade charters, borders or wars, there were dragons.

Before the first Vhannan nomad touched the latent magic that would inevitably thrust a golden age headlong into unimaginable darkness, there were dragons.

Before Equestria’s fragmented quiltwork of fiefdoms stitched themselves into the wholecloth of a monarchy whose young sibling rulers would come within a hair’s breadth of outliving it, there were dragons.

For as long as the world itself swung through the infinite void on its unremarkable orbit around an unremarkable sun, it was a well-understood fact that dragons had been the first creatures to soar across its primordial sky. The ancient scrolls that were their heritage taught the dragonfolk the secrets of their exalted origins, and reminded them of the soaring heights from which their great people had fallen. They recanted the tales of the orphan moon and the legends of the dead gods who brought it with them when they chose this world to receive the blessing of life.

Once upon a time they had ruled a world abundant with mindless prey. Creatures whose herds carpeted every continent. And what a glorious epoch it must have been, the sky priests would exhort, until their prey discovered the deep magic of the world and spread the knowledge of it like wildfire. Thus marked the beginning of the great undermining, the grand upset of the natural balance, and the disgraceful downfall of the dragons who were too proud to bend when the wind changed.

The volcanic archipelago called the dragonlands by those not born there had a multitude of names depending on which dragon you asked. Most just called them the islands. A few, including the recently elevated and politically savvy named families, liked to call it the Great Home. If the herbivores of the world wished to call their islands the dragonlands, that was fine enough a name as any and they could have it. For the majority of dragons, however, the concept of national identity was less important than knowing which islands they hailed from.

The largest island, often just called the big island by those who lived elsewhere along the chain, was formally called Respite Island by its wealthy denizens. Its volcano was moderately well behaved and its lava flows were predictable enough so as not to disrupt the lives of those named families who had recently been bestowed carefully measured shares of its fertile land. One such clan, given the name Chambers by Dragonlord Ember herself, had been given stewardship of some of the best soil on the leeward side.

The rest of the archipelago stretched north and south of Respite in a ragged crescent built up by an upwelling of the planet’s youngest oceanic mountain range. Near the big island were smaller, more densely populated isles like Talon, Howl, and The Sink. Few of these had the reliable farming of Respite. Most of their acreage tended to be dominated by the steep slopes of their home volcanos or so utterly flat that the seasonal storms would sometimes shove the sea clear across them. Life on the satellite isles could be difficult for any number of reasons ranging from natural disaster to petty crime, and according to Ember these were the tribulations that weeded out the strong from the weak. Separating the weak from the strong was every dragon’s duty, to be carried out without remorse or exception.

For countless generations the status quo was well understood and rarely challenged. Those powerful enough to defend their holdings on Respite and any other island were permitted to keep them. Minor disputes between clans could be settled through combat by representative champions, while serious grievances were often resolved by direct bloodsport between the aggrieved parties. Those without clans were on their own to decide what measures they were willing to employ to get what they needed. Theft, conniving, and murder were all fair play to those who found themselves in need of food and lacking gold. Oftentimes it was encouraged by the dragonlord themselves. After all, what use was a dragon unwilling to die fighting for their meat if the alternative was to starve anyway?

It was only in the last decade that Dragonlord Ember looked at the rapid modernization of Equestria and realized her people would have to change to survive. She’d seen the signs. She knew Equestria and Vhanna were building their glittering empires on foundations of finite resources. She knew when the great Equestrian coal seams ran scarce and the vast Vhannan oilfields ran dry there would only be one outcome, and it was her job to ensure her people weren’t seen as the backwards, primitive civilization they would appear to be if they stayed the present course.

The dragonlands would have to become a civilized nation if they didn’t want to be trodden under the hooves of their former prey. And it would fall unto her people to endure the growing pains.

June 25th, 1057
Respite Island

“It isn’t fair! He lied to me!”

Veridian stood beside her brother in the middle of the Chambers family parlor, fists balled into tight little knots as she searched the implacable faces of her mother and father. When she saw that their attention hadn’t moved from the weeping slash across her right arm, she rounded on Agate with all the indignation her twelve year old frame could muster.

“You said you would let me take the first blood!” Tears stung the corners of her eyes as the ridiculous noise of her cracking voice caused her brother’s lip to twitch ever so slightly upward, and it was that fleeting slip of his mask that let her know he’d been against her this whole time. When she spoke again, the hitch in her throat dragged a coughing sob out of her. “Aggy, you promised!”

Her arm throbbed as warm blood wove paths down to her curled fist, but her brother didn’t speak a word. Having crossed some invisible threshold, her father stood and made his way to the sideboard beneath a framed charcoal drawing of the family home. Veridian had seen similar artistry hung in the parlor of the Talon house where she had spent three evenings every week for the past summer. The Talon family had descended from a dusty old dragonlord of the same name, and so the honor had been given to them to pen what was to become the official histories of their people. Veridian was only one of dozens of hatchlings sent to their holdings on the leeward side of Respite to be given lessons on that new history. And so, as she’d tried her best to stay awake with the rest of the potentials her age, she’d noticed that the same artist who had drawn her house had done so for the Talons, too.

Her father pulled the stopper out of a decanter of amber liquid and poured himself two fingers. Veridian swallowed the slick lump in her throat as she waited for him to add a cube of ice, because it said something good about his mood when he treated himself to such a luxury. Her father’s obsidian tail flicked with consideration. Then he replaced the bottle and drained the glass, not even bothering to take it back to the couch where her mother still retained a glazed look of disinterest.

“Agate.” His voice was a throaty rumble, like thunder rolling out of a distant squall. “What did you promise your sister?”

Blood continued its slow trickle down her arm, the droplets pattering into a saturated spot on the rug as if it were ticking off the seconds. Agate stood perfectly still, his fingers wrapped around the twin kukris the two of them had been given for this morning’s combat. A part of Veridian waited for him to admit what he’d assured her before they’d gone to bed a night earlier. That he would give her first blood and the honor of being the strongest of the Chamber children. It made sense in her mind because Aggy wasn’t afraid of anything, not even being discarded. He’d be alright on his own, but not her. Not Veridian whose first growth spurt had come late.

She waited for him to explain to their father the terms of their pact. To make it not sound like she’d been afraid of being cast out, and that this agreement between the two of them made perfect sense. When Agate answered, he was very careful not to meet her expectant gaze.

“I promised a fair contest. Nothing more.”

A splinter of ice dropped into the pit of her stomach. When she looked at her father, his expression was grim. It was clear to all that he didn’t believe his son, but he approved of Veridian’s attempt to weasel out of honest combat even less. She knew at that moment the decision had been made when she left her arm exposed and Agate raked his kukri through its delicate scales.

She began to shake as her father returned to the couch, picked up an official looking sheet of paper from the end table, and took a pen offered by her mother. The room was quiet, save for the wet dripping of Veridian’s blood, as he found each blank line and scratched out the appropriate names. Agate Chambers, the victor. Veridian Chambers, the discarded. Then he signed his own at the bottom, passed the document to the ivory white dragoness beside him, and returned his gaze to Veridian as the nib scratched out her mother’s name.

“Have you packed a bag?”

The words hit her like a hammer. She hadn’t. Her chin trembled as she shook her head no.

He glanced at the ornate grandmother clock beside the parlor window, his disappointment visible in the way he worked his jaw side to side. “You have until the next hour.”

She swallowed hard. “No.”

Her father’s golden eyes flicked toward her. His voice was hard. “Pack.”

She scrubbed the tears from her eyes with the back of her fist, unaware she was smearing blood across her face as she worked up the courage to press her defiance. “I won’t.” Her chest ached for the release of a good, hard cry, but she beat it back enough that her voice was only a sniffling wobble instead of an unintelligible blubber. “You love me. You won’t make me go away if you still love me.”

Something in her words managed to cut her father in a place she would never know, but on the outside his gaze remained as unchanging as mountain granite. “Love has nothing to do with this, Veridian. This is the new way.”

“The civilized way,” her mother added, clearly pleased enough with her contribution that she saw no reason to add more.

“Go,” her father repeated. “Pack your things.”

As if conspiring against her, Veridian felt a sudden pressing urge to pee. She forced herself to ignore it. She didn’t know how she knew, but any chance she had to sleep in her own bed tonight would be gone the moment she left the parlor room. Even at twelve years old she knew it was childish to think gripping the rug with her toes would ever stop her from being moved, but she clutched at the dense fibers anyway.

“Now.”

“No!” she snapped, her tail flicking so hard that the end of it whipped the back of her brother’s heel. “I hate the new way! I don’t care what anyone says! You can’t make me leave!”

There was a long moment when neither of them said a word. Her father stared at her with an expression she’d only seen him reserve for dinner guests who hadn’t noticed his polite hints that it was time for them to leave. The same look he shot at the mail carrier who sometimes commented on the origins of their letters. The dark glare he leveled at anyone who still referred to his kin as Clan Chambers instead of The Chambers Family.

Her father stood again, only this time he left the room. Veridian wasn’t sure what to make of that until the idea came to her that he was going to pack a bag for her, and suddenly it was all she could think of. What if he didn’t pack the right things? What were the right things? She’d been so confident her brother would let her win that she hadn’t given it any thought, and only now was she beginning to understand just how stupid she’d been.

When he returned, her father was wearing one of his expensive, silk-lined waistcoats. A gold watch chain drew a glittering line from one of the buttons to the nearest pocket. In his left hand he held the old revolver he carried with him whenever business forced him to leave Respite Island. It was a weapon unique to Equestria modified to fit his hand, and the mere sight of it was enough to ward off pickpockets and street toughs. Veridian’s eyes stung with fresh tears as he gestured to the front of the house with his empty hand, bidding her to follow him.

“Let’s take a walk,” he said, and left the room.

She bit down on her lip to stop it quivering and reluctantly followed.

She found him waiting for her at the front door of the house, his arm holding it open in silent invitation. Now that she was moving, the thought of stopping to resume her protest felt ridiculous. Whatever path her life was on was already in motion. All she could do now is try to convince her father not to throw her away.

He followed her down the porch steps, then appeared at her side as he led her across the white gravel carriageway for which their family still had no motorized carriage. One day, maybe. From there, they could see all the family holdings down the island’s leeward slope. A lush quiltwork of blindweed crop followed the rolling terrain in orderly squares until it eventually reached the newly paved road that ringed the volcanic coastline. Beyond the white sand beach lay miles of ocean that blurred into a distant blue horizon dotted by the many other smaller isles of the archipelago. The largest of these emitted sickly yellow trails of smog indicative of the textile mills that had dragged a reluctant nation of dragons out of a barbaric age and into modernity.

Veridian felt a sick twist in her stomach as she sighted the largest of these smoking islands. Howl Island, the place her brother said he would find work after he was sent away. After he was discarded. Only it had been a lie.

Her father took her as far as the picket fence that divided the impressive front lawn of her home from the lucrative blindweed fields their family harvested for sale to the zebras in Vhanna. Thick, waxy leaves swayed in the everpresent breeze on either side of the gravel drive. Beside her, her father retrieved the watch from his pocket and opened the case. She could hear the regular, soft ticking of its gears as he considered the time. Then he regarded the revolver in his opposite hand.

“These are the ways things are done,” he said, his eyes returning to the fields ahead of them. “Other families would not have tolerated the defiance you showed to me. Not while you bled on my rug.”

She wiped her eyes and said nothing.

“We do this because it is necessary,” he continued, and his voice grew forceful with the steady cadence of recitation. “Veridian, this family and its name are closed to you. Respite Island is closed to you. The path ahead of you is your own to choose for however long you are able to walk it. In the name of Dragonlord Ember, you are discarded. However, because you were once my daughter, I will give you ten seconds.”

She blinked, partly to clear her vision, partly in reaction to that bewildering last statement. “Ten seconds for what?”

The revolver gave a metallic click as he thumbed back the hammer. The watch still ticked away in his opposite hand.

“To run,” he rumbled.

Her eyes grew wide as the last threads of hope he’d reconsider slipped through her fingers. She stood frozen for several, long seconds until the barrel of her father’s pistol came level with her thundering heart.

“Four,” he said. “Three.”

With a fearful cry, she ran for the cover of her family’s crops. Soon she was being pelted from all sides by their rubbery leaves while the steady, nearly metronomic crash of his pistol chased her out of her home, out of her family, and into a twisting and unknowable future.

March 1st, 1317
Present Day

Vik idly rubbed the page between the pads of her thumb and forefinger, the words of the last paragraph still waiting to be read as she let her mind skate down the long and winding tracts of her old life. She’d been reminiscing about the bad old days more often as of late, and despite being a living mind condensed into an impressively efficient bundle of sentient software, she still hadn’t been able to pin down exactly why that was. When Millie distilled her into this new flavor of existence, she had done little to organize or streamline the jangling mess of neurons that allowed thoughts to form. So her mind wandered as it had ever done, and the book she’d been reading had once more fallen victim to her fickle attention.

She wondered if her parents or Aggy had seen the crisscrossing vapor trails of the bombs when they finally flew. She thought about Knucks looking up and seeing the end coming. Her vision blurred. She wished she'd been able to tell her goodbye.

A message from Thimble popped up in the corner of her eye. She directed her attention toward it and it expanded into legibility across the bottom of her HUD. Twenty years and change had passed and he was still trying to limit his interaction with the real world to text-only communication and the occasional audio. She’d hoped by now he’d be experimenting with some of the upgraded equine mechs, but no luck. Unless something was literally on fire, which incidentally had happened a few times during the Stable’s remodeling, he firmly refused to leave his simulation.

Hey, Vik. Spiders are reporting green on final calibration. I think we’re ready.

With a sigh, she folded the corner of the unread page and tossed her copy of Savage Love onto the night stand. For a romance, it leaned heavily into a painfully inaccurate depiction of the home islands - cue erupting volcanoes, dragons bathing in lava flows, and gratuitous violence for the sake of gratuitous violence - and had become one of Vik’s guilty pleasures. There was something cathartic about peering into the unfiltered imagination of a pony author who had likely never set hoof on the archipelago. Still, the steamy sex scenes between the two dragon protagonists were imaginative enough to get Vik’s engine purring, and that counted for something.

Throwing off the bed’s thick comforter, she swung her feet to the floor and savored a convincingly reflexive yawn that crawled up her throat and strained her jaw muscles. In the time she and Thimble had been trapped in Stable 48, they’d been able to refine so much of her physical sensations that they ceased to feel artificial at all. Tears beaded the corners of her eyes as the yawn evolved into a full body affair, encouraging her to tense her shoulders and stretch her arms until the synthetic muscles trembled with exertion. When it was over, she sucked down a refreshed breath and stood up in her tiny compartment. Time to face the world.

Padding over to the compartment’s even smaller bathroom, she opened a voice connection to Thimble while she loaded her toothbrush with a slug of green gel. There wasn’t much reason for oral hygiene, but she would be damned if she started her day without performing the same morning rituals she had when she’d been flesh and blood. And besides that, synthetic saliva did tend to get a little funky after a few days in the open air. Morning breath was still morning breath no matter the flavor.

“Methidge rescheived,” she said officiously around a mouthful of minty froth. Bending to spit, she added less seriously, “Assuming this works, do you think I should greet the Cinders with double middle-fingers or go all in with a classic mooning?”

To her surprise, Thimble switched from text over to voice. “Pretty sure mooning was only ever a dragon thing.”

“Details,” she said, waving the argument away with her toothbrush. “Ass jokes transcend species. Anyway, my battery's got a little under seventy percent charge so I’m thinking I’ll have enough juice to make tracks if they get shooty again. Speaking of which, when was the last time either you or I checked the power cores?”

“About forty weeks ago. Gimme a second.” There was barely a pause before he spoke again. “Core one is at ninety-two percent, core two’s at a flat eighty, and core three is down to six.”

She winced. A few years after the Cinders managed to foul the outer door, Vik had modified the shoulder mounts of Thimble’s old armor to carry a pair of air powered jackhammers. The idea had been to use the modified armor to perform the majority of the demolition needed to widen the corridors between Mechanical and the antechamber, and it had gone remarkably well. The only problem was that the heavy use had drained most of the irreplaceable core, and it had continued to discharge even after they put it in storage.

She wrote a quick set of commands for the nearest unassigned spiders and nodded at the confirmation they sent back. Then she dropped her toothbrush in its holder and dabbed her mouth clean. “I sent spiders to prep core two for installation. If Rook is still waiting out there, I don't want to run out of juice finding out what twenty years of practice did for his brooding tough guy act.”

Despite her nervous anticipation, Vik smiled as she walked level one’s newly widened central artery. Where there had once barely been room enough for a pair of forklifts to maneuver past one another, there was sufficient space for a box truck to make a u-turn without fear of scraping either wall. Dragging the main door’s actuator arm down to the mechanical spaces had required the demolition of not only every compartment, closet, and office on one full side of the original corridor, but the conversion of the Stable’s northernmost residential lift into an extra wide freight elevator capable of handling the strain that the bulky components components would place on it.

It had taken almost a year just to manufacture the tools and equipment they needed to perform the demolition, and several more to reroute every conduit, cable, vent and pipe along the way. It had been a long and difficult project, but the end result was undeniably impressive.

She glanced at a trio of Millie’s spiders as they followed the brightly painted yellow lanes on either side of the corridor. When she did, their individual IDs popped up on her HUD along with the work ticket they were involved with. One of the monitoring spiders had identified a power junction in need of servicing, and these spiders had gotten the assignment. They skittered along with the necessary tools and materials jostling inside the standardized plastic tub they carried between them, then turned off into one of the older corridors and out of sight.

She briefly wondered if they’d ever need halls this wide again or if they would just remain a lasting artifact of that single project. Probably the latter, she decided. Though if Thimble ever did overcome his chronic agoraphobia, maybe he’d enjoy an office chair race down the open concrete. She smiled at the thought, only for it to fade when she remembered where it came from.

Losing Pike remained a wound that refused to fully heal even though the pain had long since grown dull, and she couldn't help but worry about how much longer she could justify wearing Millie’s old limbic restraints like some rusting suit of armor. At some point the armor would become a crutch, if it hadn't already.

A spider gradually overtook her as she entered the Atrium. She quickened her pace a little to keep up as she followed its path through the gridlike staging area, passing neatly stacked cubes of crated materials and heavy moving equipment likely to never be needed now that the last pieces of the new actuator had passed through. Then the little arachnid led her into the upward sloping access tunnel, where the old Security office and decontamination space used to be, and beneath the hydraulic steel slab that hung above the threshold of Stable 48’s antechamber.

“Big fucker,” she commented aloud as she laid eyes on the newly completed actuator.

“Go big or stay home,” Thimble replied in her ear, no doubt watching from the old camera bulbs mounted overhead. “Let’s do one last precheck before we hit the big red button. I don’t want this thing tearing itself off its mounts because we forgot to lubricate a camshaft.”

“You’ve got my eyes if you need them,” she confirmed, then smirked when a tiny red dot appeared off to the side of her HUD. He’d opened up a live feed to see what she was seeing. Two decades ago, there wasn’t a chance in the four hells she’d allow him that kind of access. Nowadays, she hardly cared at all.

Surrounding the partially extracted and hopelessly bound up cog waited a swarm of Millie’s spiders. Some were tasked to monitor for vibrations while others kept their lenses focused on markings Vik had instructed them to paint across the seam between the door and its frame. They would be the first to detect movement as well as being responsible for shutting down the actuator as soon as one of them spotted a gap. The last thing they wanted was to yank the door fully open and suddenly need to go on the defensive.

Dominating the center of the antechamber, the new actuator mechanism was almost twice the diameter of the original and was easily four times as heavy. Rather than suspend something that massive from the old ceiling mounts and risk physics bringing half a mountain of granite down on their heads, they opted for the safer route of reinforcing the floors directly beneath the antechamber and mounting the new actuator directly to the floor. It didn’t have that classic Stable-Tec overengineering flair, but Vik was okay with trading a market-unfriendly appearance for reliable functionality. By all accounts, it looked like an old fashioned power plant generator with a two-foot-wide length of tungsten piston jutting from one end. Yet while generators were designed to rotate, this monolithic lump of machinery was built for the express purpose of pulling. Beneath the neatly bolted stainless steel chassis were an arrangement of progressively larger gears which Vik and Thimble had learned by trial and error to machine to micron tolerance to ensure there was no room for slippage when they slotted into the notches cut into the main shaft.

It was a machine designed for brute force, not elegance. Either it would work, or it would fail catastrophically. There could be no in-between.

After half an hour of diagnostics, and with the new actuator reporting green, Vik went to the control console at the back of the room and fed in the randomly generated passcode served up by the black box terminal at her side. That had been one of Thimble’s genius inventions. The console and terminal were hardwired together with no connection to Stable-Tec’s wider network, which meant the Cinders could stack an entire army of Pip-Buck equipped experts outside the door and have less than zero chance of hacking it. It was the kind of home security Vik could really get behind.

“Alright,” she intoned, her finger poised above the glowing red key labeled RETRACT. “Here goes something.”

The key gave a satisfying click and the actuator hummed to life. She turned her eyes to the gauges.

“Pressure’s good,” Thimble observed.

Vik nodded. “I see it.”

The actuator’s hum ramped up to an all-encompassing howling of pumps and tornadic gears. On the console, needles began to tick gently past pressure markers and voltage thresholds as the force pulling on the trapped, behemoth cog grew stronger. They both knew that this was the easy part, like pulling the first bars of vacuum in a plugged syringe. Soon would come the dangerous bit.

“Little vibration,” Thimble said. “Coming from the door. There it is again.”

“Movement?”

“Couple millimeters on the nine o’clock, nothing yet on the opposite face. Looks like it’s starting to true up.”

Given the cog had twisted in its frame before binding, it was excellent news. Then, with a sound as if the orphan moon itself had fallen from the sky, the great cog emitted a concussive explosion of noise. Then another. Then again and again in a rapidly accelerating succession that forced Vik to drop the sensitivity of her own hearing just to think straight. Without discussion, they both switched over to text-only communication.

The fuck is that?!

Thimble’s response was a touch less panicked. Spiders are showing movement on all sides now. It’s slipping over all that crud we shoved it on top of when we busted up their welds.

She shot a worried glance at the pressure gauge. Behind the glass cover, the needle bucked and jounced into the red with every gonging explosion.

How worried should I be right now?

Let’s call it… medium worried.

A deep, secondary shuddering resonance sent gray curtains of construction dust sifting down from the overhead.

Medium-high worried, he amended. I’m seeing deflection from the outer wall.

The floor beneath her feet was vibrating hard enough to spoil her balance, and she looked up to see the reflected light in the Stable’s outermost wall dance and warp in tune with horrendous drumbeat.

Do I need to get–

She didn’t finish composing the message before a singularly terrible BANG tore through the antechamber, sending shards of ruptured fluorescent tubes raining to the floor and several of the spiders tumbling into one another as their tenuous footholds were jerked out from beneath them. In the smoky, half-lit darkness that followed, the massive actuator began winding down to make room for a deeper, uneasy silence.

Thimble was back in her ear before she could send her abortive message. “Break out the party poppers. Door’s open.”

She blinked at that. She’d been expecting him to say something closer to, “The roof is coming down, we’re all going to die.”

“It’s open?” she asked dumbly instead, already hustling her way out from behind the console toward the cog. “How far?”

“Spiders shut it down at seventeen millimeters. I’m moving them out of view from the gap just in case.”

“Good instinct.”

Her bare claws clicked over the thick reinforced steel that had replaced the original diamond pattern treads. There were bright parallel scrapes of tungsten along the cog’s lowermost teeth where debris had been trapped, and several spots where grooves had carved into the finish. Despite how hard it was, even tungsten had limitations. They would need to clean out as much of the residual grit as they could before they could even think about resealing the door.

She felt relief when she spotted the thin, silver light cutting through the antechamber’s dusty gloom. It had been a long time since she felt the nervous pangs of claustrophobia, but that was because the last two busy decades had shaped it into a low background hum. Pushing her face close to the gap and seeing the dim afternoon sunlight coloring the strange structures outside, she felt the last of that old anxiety melt away.

“Huh,” she murmured toward the silence on the other side of the gap. “No welcome wagon? Not even a villainous slow clap?”

The encampment, or what little she could see of it through the narrow slit, had grown since the day she endured all of Rook’s theatrical posturing. To her surprise, the outhouse was still there, although the corrugated metal roof looked moth eaten with all the new rusted holes. Beyond it was a larger structure, a ramshackle plank and metal building of some kind whose purpose she couldn’t divine. Blades of tall, sickly grasses grew in clumps around the foundations of both structures, and she could make out the swaying tips of a few yellowish pines over the top of the larger building’s sagging roof.

She frowned. “Think they scattered when the door got all hinky-boom-boom?”

“Hinky… boom-boom,” Thimble repeated in a dry tone that eventually gave way to a grudging chuckle. “Might’ve done. Be quiet for a second?”

She turned her ear to the gap and waited.

“Yeah, I’m not seeing anything in the audio feed, but there might be enough buildings out there now to scatter their noise if they bolted for cover.”

“Guess I’ll have to break the ice, then.”

She brought her mouth back to the gap and raised her voice to the approximate limit of her ability to shout as a flesh and blood dragon. Of course she had the equipment to get even louder, but now didn’t seem the appropriate time to show that off.

“Hello, out there!” she hollered, pausing briefly to register the echo of her own voice. If they were out there, they’d hear her. “I don’t know if any of you were around back when ol’ Rook was making an ass out of himself, but I - we - are willing to forgo making the next guy swallow his molars if they’re willing to be neighborly.”

Thimble sighed when she was finished. “Diplomatic as always.”

“I try,” she quipped back, then paused to listen for a response.

None came. She waited five more minutes with Thimble running everything she heard through every filter and scrubber he had. There was nothing. Not a whisper or a cough. All she heard was the gentle rushing of the wind outside and the hum of the air recyclers inside.

“Okay,” she said, stepping away from the gap and looking up at Thimble’s nearest camera. “Let’s fire up the big guns and see if I can’t flush ‘em out.”

June 28th, 1057
Howl Island
Three Days Later

An early morning squall thundered moodily above the gaps between crowded brick buildings, sending a steady deluge of murky water onto the heads of every dragon unlucky enough to be caught outside. Deep puddles of rainwater drained their contents into their many peers in the roads and alleys, each of them swirling with a rainbow slick of reeking detritus. Cooking oil thrown into the gutter by street vendors clotted in the iridescent murk of garbage water and whatever chemicals were leaching from the posters and signs glued in scabby layers to the brickwork. Every now and then the booming of the storm would be joined by the raised voices of a nearby brawl whose intensity could range from a lover’s quarrel to murderous assault. The only bit of good to any of it was that, like with all the storms that blew in across the islands, at least the rain was warm.

It wasn’t much of a silver lining. Veridian’s belly folded onto itself with another painful cramp, just one of the dozens she’d suffered through this morning after thirst finally forced her to cup her hands under a flowing downspout and drink the brackish water. Now her empty stomach was doing its utmost to punish her for the simple crime of wanting to fill it with something. Anything. It occurred to her only now, as she sat alone in an alley between a butcher’s store and a shuttered pawn shop, that she had never experienced hunger or thirst in her entire life. Not real hunger. Not the kind that kept her awake at night, gnawing at her insides like some feral thing that only got worse with every hour. Not the kind of thirst that twisted up her brain into feeling simultaneously too weak to do anything and too uncomfortable to relax.

On Respite, her mother told stories about the lazy beggars on the other islands who would rather starve than do an honest day’s work. She’d believed those stories, too. She’d woken up on her fair share of mornings wishing she could lay in bed for the entire day, cozy under her heavy comforter on the rare chilly morning. It only made sense to think there were grown dragons who lived like that, glad to shirk their responsibilities only to look around in pitiless shock when their betters rightly refused to feed them. It made for a pretty morality tale, right up until it had been her turn to rely on the kindness of strangers.

She found none.

Her stomach lurched again, and for a moment she worried she would need to get up and make her way to the storm drain near the back of the alley that had served as her reeking toilet. But the pain was mercifully limited to her stomach, sparing her bowels this time. She wasn’t even sure she had anything left in her to evacuate after the hells of last night. Slowly, she pulled her knees up to her chest and settled her forehead between them. Warm rain splashed uncomfortably across her neck and shoulders, ran down her cheeks, and around her snout. Miserably, she licked at the salty droplets as they came.

She resolved to ask the butcher again for a chance to work once he opened up shop. He’d been the only one who hadn’t threatened to hurt her when he threw her out. Too many others had, almost as if they thought she wouldn’t leave unless they chased her out with bats or fists. The butcher had only pointed toward the door with the bloody end of his knife, and that had been enough. Now, after three days on her own, Veridian had no choice but to hope the people she chose to beg from didn’t make good on those threats.

Thunder was still grumbling high above the islands when she heard the butcher's squeaky front door to open and slam. She perched her chin onto her knees, staring dully at the rainwater sheeting over the collage of soggy posters pasted to the alley’s far wall. Most of them warned her not to commit a variety of minor crimes, particularly loitering. Some claimed to know ways to earn gold fast. There was even a colorful ad for some kind of pill by Maiden Pharmaceutical, but the text was too small for her to see in the downpour.

The squeak-slam of the door echoed into the alley a second time. She waited until she heard it again before unwrapping her tail and, with a worrying amount of effort, pushed herself up to stand. She held one hand against the bricks to steady herself against the vertigo that crammed into her head, then took the first unsteady step toward the alley’s mouth as she resigned herself to another day of pointless hoping.

The bell above the door tinkled as she shouldered her way inside, drawing an aggravated glance from the same pot bellied proprietor who evicted her yesterday. The coppery scent of beef blood mixed with the harsh odor of the heavily seasoned meats he was putting on display did nothing to ease her recent stomach troubles. She could tell that he was already getting ready to shout her back into the rain. She tried to come up with something, anything to say that might extract a bit of sympathy from the butcher and cursed herself for not being able to think straight. The hunger and nausea was making the task of stringing two coherent thoughts together more challenging than it had a day before.

The bell tinkled again and the butcher’s eyes flicked past her. His brow furrowed as she continued to struggle for words, then widened. He began lifting his hands, palms out.

Something sharp pressed into the small of Veridian's back. “Your gold,” a voice said, and she realized it was speaking to her. “All of it. Now.”

She looked down to where an upturned hand had snaked past her left arm and waited expectantly. Her first instinct was to take it with her right, turn, and take the first steps of the waltz her tutor had been trying to teach her just last week. Civilized dance. Etiquette. That was how the dragonlands was going to crawl up out of the–

The intruding fingers snapped twice. The blade pressed harder against her back, bending the soft scales.

Oh, she distantly reallized. I’m being robbed.

Words her father once made her memorize surfaced in her mind. Words that made perfect sense to know at the time, and which she and her brother had both naively worn like armor for when their parents would take them out to one of these stinking cities. Words, she realized, which had nothing to do with protecting her at all.

“My name is Veridian Chambers,” she recited as the first tidal bore of adrenaline made her world tilt. “My father does not pay ransoms. The militia will hunt… will hunt you…”

She turned, trying to keep her waning balance, and caught a fleeting glimpse of the dragon holding the knife. Tall, scrawny, and covered in a dirty yellow rain slicker. There was an instant between them where their eyes met. Then her vision tunneled, the world rotated, and gravity dragged her limp body to the ground.

She woke to an exchange of hushed and excited voices.

“...back where you got her!”

“Ooh, Knucks has a giiirlfriend.”

“That isn’t what–”

“She’s probably got someone looking for her!”

“Since when does that make any difference?”

“She’s from a Family, isn’t she?”

“Well, yeah, but–”

“Oh, sh–”

“She’s named?! Are you insane? Do you want the militia to kick down our door?”

Something soft was propping up her head, and when she opened her eyes she could see that someone had rolled a bundle of old clothing into a roughly tube-shaped pillow. Sleeves and collars poked out here and there in a variety of casual and formal wear, none of which she’d ever be caught in. When she looked beyond where she lay, she had to squint against the harsh glow of an electric heater. Beyond that, a trio of dragons stood in a conspiratorial knot of crossed arms and nervous flicking tails.

She recognized the dirty raincoat of the one who put the knife to her back inside the butcher’s shop, and a quick glance confirmed she was female. The two who huddled at either side of her were most likely male, though she couldn’t get a clear view of their genital slits to confirm the difference. Their voices were passably low, however, especially the older albino who broadcasted his aggravation with exuberant hand gestures.

“Where did you pick her up?” the albino pressed, his bagged pink eyes seeking the female’s. “Tell me where, and I’ll drop her off somewhere nearby. This doesn’t have to come back to us.”

The female, Knucks apparently, threw up her hands in exasperation. “You’re making this into a bigger deal than it is, Fizzle! She’s half starved and just a kid. And she just… passed the fuck out on me! What was I supposed to do, just leave her there?”

“Yes!” Fizzle snapped, an accusing finger lashing out past the space heater directly toward Veridian. “That! You should have done that!”

“She’s watching us,” the other male said, his buggy green eyes fixing her like he was an exotic frog. He poked Knucks in the armpit, drawing an indignant glare from her as he repeated himself. “You guys. Look.”

They followed his gaze and Veridian suddenly wished she could shrink into herself and hide. Fizzle’s lips pursed with poorly masked agitation while Knucks and the other male just stared at her, clearly trying to work out what her being awake and listening meant for their discussion.

Knucks was the first to break the silence. “Hey, kid. How’re you–?”

Fizzle waved her silent and crouched just behind the electric heater, his milky pink eyes unsettling in their intensity. “What’s your name?”

She swallowed, and her throat threatened to glue itself shut. “Veridian.”

He twirled his hand. “Veridian what?”

“Chambers.”

He stood with a hiss. “A shitting Chambers. Shit, shit, shit. Knucks, this is your problem. You need to fix it.”

“My family does not…” she began reciting again, not knowing what else to do. Only now the words were like ash in her mouth.

My family does not pay ransoms.

Her family did not want weak heirs. That was the reality she’d been pushed into when her brother slashed her arm instead of the other way around. Before then, all of it had been something the other families did. It hadn’t been real until her father began to count down the seconds.

Knucks sucked at her teeth, ignoring Fizzle’s glare as she knelt down on the floor beside her. “You’re not our hostage,” she assured, “but maybe you got folks on Respite who might be looking for you, yeah? Are any of them the generous type? Reward is different from ransom.”

Veridian curled into a miserable ball, the tears threatening to spill over again. “No.”

“No as in nobody’s looking for you, or no as in no reward?”

She averted her eyes, trying to find something to look at that wasn’t badgering her for money and answers. They fixed on the dusty wall of big, cardboard boxes stacked in columns near her feet. They were big enough for several dragons to pile into at the same time and banded to old cedar pallets. They bore the stenciled names of various charities she recognized. “Coats Across Equestria,” “Project Peace,” and “World Hearthswarming” were among them in a variety of logos and fonts. One of them had a small hole neatly cut out of the center through which part of an old dress spilled. Suddenly the cloth bundle pillow made more sense.

A hand touched her shoulder and gave it a gentle shake. Knucks’s hand. “Kid, if you go ziplips on me, Fizzle’s gonna toss you out. Probably he’s gonna do that anyway, but still, maybe we can take you to wherever it is you’re holed up. Drop you off somewhere familiar, yaknow?”

“Oh,” the other male said, still standing where he’d been when Veridian first came to. “Oh, shit. That makes sense.”

Knucks and Fizzle frowned back at him, the latter speaking first. “Care to share with the non-psychics, Croaker?”

Croaker blinked his bulbous green eyes, then smiled to reveal some of the worst dentistry Veridian had ever seen. “Ain’t it obvious? She’s a Discarded.”

There was silence between them all for what felt like minutes before Knucks spoke up again. “That true, kid?”

It occurred to her that she was grinding her teeth, something she did whenever a sullen thundercloud began to form over her head. It felt good - the anger, not the gnashing - and she surprised herself when she realized her tears were running dry.

“Yes,” she muttered.

The other dragons seemed to visibly relax at the admission, as if being thrown out and shot at by her own father was a good thing.

Knucks nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a nix on the reward, then. So nobody's looking for you. Okay. Alright, that's workable. Ain't it, Fizz?”

Fizzle's frown grew determined. “We don't take in strays.”

Knucks just grinned back like they were sharing a joke. “Sure we don't.” That said, she looked back to Veridian. “So, I'm a little fuzzy on the whole discarded thing, but what I do know is that you kinda lose your name in the deal. They told you about that, yeah?”

She blinked several times, trying to remember.

“So you need a new one,” Knucks kept on saying. “False claims to a capital ‘F’ Family name is a quick way to get yourself tossed in a dark room for a long time. Gonna need a new one while you're with us.”

“Knucks,” Fizzle growled.

She rounded on him, her wings snapping wide. “If I didn't ask for your fuckin’ permission before, then I ain't askin’ for it now. It's not permanent. Just until she figures out how shit works. Is that o-fuckin’-kay with you?”

He held up his hands, looking dissatisfied but not willing to push any further. Knucks eyed him a moment longer before relaxing and returning to the topic. “Ignore him, he's just a little slow. So is there something a little easier we can call you? Got a nickname?”

She looked between the three of them, then down at her upturned palms. Her eyes stung a little as she tried to just hang on to the rollercoaster that had become her life.

“I've always been Veridian Chambers,” she murmured. The space was quiet for what felt like a long time before she spoke again. “I don't know. Veri?”

Knucks winced at that. “Maybe something less adjective-y?”

Flustered now, she sounded out the first syllable that came to mind. “Vic…”

“Ooh,” Croaker perked up. “Vik. I like Vik. But with a K at the end, you know?”

She frowned into her lap. This was all going too fast.

“It does have a nice snap to it,” Knucks agreed, her hands flicking open as she gave the new word emphasis. “Vik. Whatcha think, Fizzle?”

The elder dragon shrugged, clearly still unhappy he'd been overruled. “Heard worse. Up to the kid.”

Knucks snorted at his deep insight and gently punched Veridian's shoulder. “Okay, Vik. You'll be sticking with us, at least for a little while. Until you learn the ropes.”

She considered arguing that they had just made a lot of assumptions on her behalf, but her belly emitted a high peal of protest before she could.

Knucks was grinning. “Bet you're hungry. You like fish?”

She, in fact, loved fish. Her family sometimes had salmon imported from the fisheries down the gryphon coast, and the cook could do some amazing things with an open bed of coals and a few sprigs of basil leaf.

“Cool. We got some cans stashed away. Fizzle can explain the house rules while you eat. It's mostly tuna but, well…”

“Beggars can't be choosers,” Vik recited her mother’s favorite words.

Knucks snapped her fingers in a way that ended with one pointed squarely at her. “Exactly right.”

“Anything?”

“You’re seeing the same thing I am. Nobody’s here.” The armored hoof of her suit crunched through something soft, and she turned the helmet down to find she’d stepped in the remains of a very old cookfire. Sprigs of something like poison oak had made a go of growing through the cold coals, right up until she came along to squash it. “Doesn’t look like these buildings have been touched in years.”

The Cinder encampment had grown substantially since the last time she’d seen it. Multiple outbuildings had been constructed with seemingly whatever sturdy materials were nearby, and judging by the look of the salt washed boards and rust red sheet metal, a lot of it had been pulled out of whatever remained of Buckskin Bay. With the exception of the single wide path that led from Stable 48’s open door to the eerie looking pine forest that grew up to replace the one that had burned so long ago, there was little organization to where any two buildings were placed.

The largest of these, a pair of dangerously leaning structures built from a menagerie of hewn timber posts and common wreckage, were two-story… she didn’t want to say cabins, but lacked a better word. The cabins were what she’d seen through the gap and appeared to have been meant to serve as a communal gathering hall or maybe even a rough throneroom for Rook, or whoever replaced him. Here was where the majority of the encampment’s furniture had ended up. Tables ranging from handmade to cheaply veneered folding tables formed long rows in the open space of both cabins, but only one of them featured an additional raised platform at the end of the main room atop which a much nicer formal dinner table had been arranged in front of two black banners. One of them had come unfixed from the wire they were both suspended from, but Vik was confident that it would feature the same stylistic orange line meant to represent the curves of a single flame.

There had been a group of dragons on Howl Island who used iconography like that to mark what they believed was their territory in the slums. Only, they had stolen buckets of paint to slash their marks in the alleys they knew nobody would catch them in. These banners gave Vik the sense that whoever the Cinders were, they took themselves a lot more seriously.

Beyond the twin cabins, she found dozens of little shacks and shanties out in the taller grass and among the shrubs. Most were single-room jobs. Barely four walls and a roof, with enough space inside to fit a mattress or something equally soft. A few were wide enough to justify a second room, but since her power armor could hardly fit through their narrow entryways Vik had to settle with what she could see from the outside.

All, save for a few, appeared to have been ransacked. Sleeping pads had been flipped over, open satchels and saddlebags littering the grass around each of the shacks. She found countless crude, discarded weapons gathering rust and lichen in the dirt. None of them were loaded.

“Stripped for ammunition,” Thimble commented as she nudged a heavily modified pipe weapon with the edge of her suit’s hoof. It left a dark indentation of itself in the soil. Its magazine was nowhere to be seen. “They left in a real big hurry.”

Vik ducked her helmet into the lopsided shack for a moment before pulling back out and peering around at all the others. “This is a lot of people to just pack up and run off with. You’ve been keeping tabs on that radio station down south, same as me. Do you remember hearing him report anything that might chase off an armed militia?”

“I think the modern word is raiders,” he amended, and she hoped he could tell she was rolling her eyes at that. “No, though. I mean, not recently. Definitely not since that balefire bomb cracked off out east, and that was two decades ago.”

“Yeah,” she murmured to herself. “And half these buildings wouldn’t have gotten built if they tucked tail and ran then. They stuck around long enough to drag all these materials here and make something out of them. Whatever got them spooked happened later.”

“It’d be nice if our dear old friends on West Coast Classical actually reported on what was happening out there instead of occasionally listing off the safe roads of the day. How hard is it to report the news?”

She shrugged, or as much of a shrug as a multi-ton suit of mechanized power armor would allow. “Maybe someone is and we’re out of range. Back before the world burned, I was lucky to get two clear channels on my TV and one of them was EBS.”

Thimble’s bewildered silence asked the question for him.

“The Equestrian Broadcast Service,” she explained. “You could tune into it if you hated being awake. Ministry-sponsored reassurances that the war was going great during the daytime, test pattern during the night. Riveting stuff.” Leaving the shacks behind, she began making her way up the slope and back to the packed dirt path. “Why am I explaining this to you? You told me you were a kid when the bombs fell.”

“I lived closer to civilization,” he defended. “We had cartoons.”

She smirked at that and continued toward the path. But as she passed by the rear of the largest cabin, she caught sight of something strange that made her stop.

“Are those?”

“Bullet holes,” Vik finished for him, the levity draining from her voice as she approached the plank and metal wall. There weren’t many of them, less than two dozen in all, but what they hinted at was unmistakable in the way they formed five distinct groupings at what would have been roughly head level for an average pony.

Time and weather had washed away all other evidence of what had taken place here, but Vik didn’t need bloodstains or brain matter to do the math. She’d seen this before. She knew how it went. A stationary target was a hard one to miss, and the loosely grouped holes behind the cabin were very likely all missed shots. Those wouldn’t happen often, not during an execution, which meant they had to be a fraction of all the shots that found their target.

She looked down and spotted the casings. The only reason she hadn’t noticed them earlier was due to how the oxidation had camouflaged them among the weeds. She didn’t bother counting them. There were enough here that she already knew the numbers would support her theory.

This hadn’t been a convenient place for the Cinders to enact the occasional dollop of tough justice. This had been the site of an extermination.

“Well, fuck,” she breathed. Then again, more loudly. “I guess nobody ever got around to rebuilding polite society in the last two centuries.”

“Closer to two and a half, now.”

Vik tried to pull an irritated expression, but the equine mech piloting the suit’s controls was one of the old versions and probably just looked constipated. “That’s not better. Two hundred and forty years is a long time not to pick up the pieces. What gives? I thought you ponies were the pinnacle of modern society. This is the kind of shit my people used to do.”

“It’s not a good sign,” Thimble tentatively agreed. “Are you sure you still want to go walking around out there if things are still this…”

She waited for him to find the word, then offered one herself. “Fluid?”

“I was going to say unstable, but I didn’t want to go with the obvious pun.” Something hissed in her ear, and she realized he’d cracked open a simulated beer. Real or not, he’d only gotten better at stocking his fridge with convincingly tasty food and drink, and Vik found herself craving one of the pale ales he kept in reserve for when the Stable door project hit significant milestones. “If the Cinders weren’t the biggest fish in the ocean, I don’t know if it’s a great idea for you to go out and risk running into whoever had been able to push Rook’s people in front of a firing squad five at a time.”

Not wanting to stand around and stare at what had once been the site of so much death, Vik maneuvered the suit onto the dirt path and began making her way back to the Stable’s freshly opened door. “Thimble, we’ve talked about this. I don’t want to keep walking around the same empty Stable for the rest of my life, and the same goes for living in a sim.”

His voice took on a pleading tone as the door rumbled shut behind her. “But you saw that it’s not safe out there.”

“I did,” she said, parking the power armor near the newly built actuator and switching over to her much more comfortable draconic body, which she’d left leaning against a cube of still unopened Pip-Buck crates at the edge of the Atrium storage area. Once she was fully connected and the momentary disorientation had passed, she stepped out to find one of the nearest ceiling cameras and gave it a deliberate, emphatic nod. “I know it’s not safe, and I won’t ever try to play that down with you. But the whole world is still out there, dangerous or not, and I want to at least try to live in it. Right?”

After a pause, he offered a reluctant, “Right.”

“I’m not leaving you behind, Thimble. My server is still going to be one row down from yours, so I’ll be able to pester you in sim no matter how far away I get.”

“Okay.”

The compulsion to jump to his sim and hug him was strong, but she wasn’t sure if he’d take it as comfort or teasing. But she didn’t want to risk him thinking she didn’t take his fears seriously, so she held off.

“Are you mad at me?”

“No. Just worried. Worried you’ll get hurt.”

She smiled at that. “I have spares now, remember? If I accidentally walk this body off a cliff, I can grab another one off the charging plate and try again.”

“Until somebody finds your body and sees all the wires.”

“There’s nothing on or in me that can lead anyone back here. And even if someone does, we’ve got the door restricted to manual control now. Stable-Tec itself could drive up that road and wouldn’t be able to do anything but shake their hooves at the mountain.” She started making her way back into the Stable proper and took note of Thimble’s watchful eye following her from lens to lens. “Think of it like an arcade game. I’ve got, like, a hundred free lives.”

“I’ve never been to an arcade.”

“I’ll eat a lug nut if you can honestly tell me you’ve never played any of the games Stable-Tec has on those servers,” she chided. “I’m serious. I’ll do it.”

She had to admit. She was relieved when he didn’t call her bluff. “Fine. I get it. Just… regular visits, okay? I don’t…”

“You’re not going to be alone,” she soothed. “There is literally no scenario where I get so distracted that I won’t kick down your door to see if you’re diddling your piddle, okay?”

That succeeded in getting an embarrassed laugh from him. “Well shit, when you put it that way.”

She grinned at a passing camera. “We’ll hang out, I promise. And, hey, if it ever feels like I’m not making time, you’ve got my permission to barge in on me. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” he agreed. “Sorry, Vik. I just worry a lot, you know?”

Having been forced to endure nearly six decades being relentlessly worked over by Millie, she could absolutely understand why he worried so much about being left alone. For Thimble, Vik was his unspoken guardian. She’d been the one to kill Millie and find his discarded code in the old partitions. He was gradually beginning to rebuild the confidence Millie had flayed from him, but it would be a long time before he would be truly comfortable with the idea of independence.

“You’re not a worrier,” she assured him, hoping to divert some of that internal shame toward something more productive. “You’re protective, and I’m going to need someone like that watching my back when I’m out there meeting the locals.”

He chuckled a little sheepishly. “I guess. Where are you going, anyway?”

She stretched her grin a little wider. “To Fabrication, then down to Supply. It’ll look pretty strange for a random dragon to be walking around empty-handed, especially if things are as bad out there as we think they might be, and I’m not exactly built for saddlebags.”

“So…?” he asked.

“I’ll need a backpack,” she explained, and when his confused silence continued, she elaborated. “A saddlebag, but for my back.”

“What about your wings?”

She rolled her eyes and absently rolled each of them in their sockets. “I’m more than double my original weight when I was meat and bone. These things are functional decorations. The only way this body will ever fly is if I stick a rocket up my ass and light the fuse. They’ll be fine under a backpack. Anyone who wants me to soar like the eagles can kick rocks.”

“You ready, Vik?”

“I think so.”

“That’s not an answer. I asked if you were ready.”

Vik chewed her lip as they watched the militia patrol shrinking away down the rain slicked sidewalk. Knucks watched her intently, waiting for a response. This was a test for her as much as it was for Vik. Knucks had been the one to advocate she be allowed to join their trio, now tentatively a quartet, and the one rule Fizzle had was that everyone in the gang earn their keep. For the past couple of weeks he’d allowed Vik to recover her strength while Knucks helped her acclimate to living in the slums, but two weeks had been his limit. If she wanted to keep enjoying a share of the spoils, she’d need to start pulling in some of her own.

Vik nodded, once. “Yes.”

Knucks slapped her on the shoulder almost hard enough to make her yelp. For a dragoness, Knucks was built like a male in many respects. All toned muscle and built like she knew how to use it. Damp from the late evening rain and lit by the oil lamps along the cobblestone street, her bronze scales resembled liquid gold. She nearly said as much, not knowing what else to say now that her test was about to begin. A year ago her father had taken her and her brother to see the great forges of the nation’s one and only mint, and she’d watched the workers toil in the sweltering heat of the crucibles. Being allowed into the mint had been a great honor even for a named family, and she hadn’t forgotten the mesmerizing way the molten gold seemed to hang suspended like a red hot ribbon as it was poured into the casts.

If her test went well, she would be bringing some of that gold back to the hideout before moonrise.

Both of them wore the dirty brown kerchiefs of millworkers around their necks and had daubed themselves in a suitable amount of soot to match. Shift change at the iron mill had come and gone a little less than an hour earlier which would give them a believable excuse that they’d been held over until they met their quota. Vik had never actually seen the inside of an iron mill just yet, but Knucks was seventeen and had been stuck hauling ingots when she met Fizzle and Croaker.

It occurred to her just then what her parents would say about the arrangement she and Knucks were in, and her crest bristled with belated worry. “Do Fizzle and Croaker…?”

“No. They’re not like that,” she’d assured her. “There’s a brothel on the western edge of the island Croaker likes that’s known for… older dragonesses, and Fizzle isn’t interested in anyone that way at all.”

It was a relief to hear, but she still blinked at that last part. “Not anyone? Why?”

Knucks shrugged. “I try not to get hung up on why, it’s just how it is with him. As for Croaker, you’re about forty years too young for him. Trust me, I wouldn’t have stuck with them this long if they couldn’t keep their claws to themselves. Now which one are you hitting?”

“What…” she began, then realized Knucks was asking her about the lamplit storefronts lining the rainy street ahead of them. “Oh.”

After some thought, she tipped her dripping snout toward one of the narrow shops across the street. A single square window beside the door was adorned with thick, ornate lettering that spelled out QUALITY RODS AND REELS in diagonal script that took up most of the pane. A small shelf at the bottom of the sill displayed a selection of fishing reels, lures, and line alongside price tags that made it hard to believe the proprietor wasn’t shining up and reselling the common junk one could find freediving out in the ocean shallows.

“Why there?” Knucks asked, her tone making it clear her answer would be scrutinized.

Vik held her ground. “Because it’s low traffic,” she said, “and the window paint makes it hard to see what’s going on inside.”

“Good so far. What else?”

She resisted the urge to point. “The cash register. It’s an Equestrian antique. My dad… I used to play with one just like it before I met you.”

Knucks’s eyebrows rose. “Then you know they’ve got a bell.”

“Sure.”

“And the owner will hear it when you set it off.”

“It won’t.”

There was a brief silence as Knucks considered what probably sounded like a vague and unnecessarily ambitious plan. “Less risky to just go in and pinch a few fishing reels while the owner is busy.”

Vik turned to stare at Knucks in the same way she used to do with her mom whenever something minor hadn’t gone her way. But whining over having her first test shot down before she could even try wasn't going to go anywhere with Knucks, and Vik knew it as soon as she saw Knucks' expression close down in preparation.

She grit her teeth and mentally pivoted, forcing herself to think of a different way to approach this roadblock without sounding like the twelve-year-old that she was. The answer was embarrassingly obvious when she thought of it: be more convincing.

“My dad used to collect old stuff like that, and he had a cash register just like that one in his study,” she said, waiting for Knucks to cut her off and pleasantly surprised when she didn’t. “He’d keep stuff in it that he didn’t want my brother and I getting into. Imported chocolates, mainly, but some other stuff too. Stuff he’d give out to the grown-ups when he hosted parties at the house.”

Knucks’s brow ticked up. “Like?”

Vik looked down at her feet. Her bare claws made ripples in the gutter water. She dodged the question. “Agate was the one who found the keys to it, but I found out which ones did what. There’s a long, skinny one that stops the bell from ringing when you open the drawer and we used it to steal chocolates without getting caught.”

Knucks was still watching her, but she didn’t look up from the puddle. “The key sticking out of the side of that register is the same kind my brother and I used.”

When she did look up, she saw that Knucks was squinting through the rain toward the cash counter inside the shop. Squinting hard, actually, like she couldn’t see as good as Vik could.

“I bet he turns the bell off when it gets busy,” she said to fill the silence.

“Maybe,” Knucks allowed. “I can’t see it from here. What’s your plan, then?”

“Well…” She hesitated for a moment, then took a breath and kept going. “I’m kind of hoping you’ll say you’re good at acting.”

Ten minutes later, Knucks barged into the little fishing shop with her bronze tail clamped against her ass and shouting for someone, anyone to point her toward the nearest toilet. Vik slipped in close behind Knucks as a morbidly overweight dragon jerked up from the stool behind the cash counter with a look of shock and outrage. In the ensuing chaos of Knucks frantically pushing past the cash counter and through a closed door presumably leading to a stockroom, Vik’s presence was entirely forgotten by an owner whose sole goal in life was shouting increasingly desperate directions at the dragoness who appeared seconds away from losing a war with her bowels.

Vik wasted no time hurrying out from behind a barrel of mismatched fishing rods and toward the cash register. As the shouting and thunder of footfall around the stockroom grew louder, she climbed the owner’s stool and turned the register’s bell lock down to the engaged position. At least, she hoped it was engaged. These old machines didn’t have clear labeling, and the ornate yet heavily tarnished register wasn’t an exact match to the gleaming antique her father surrounded with his most prized books.

Setting her jaw, she held her thumb against the drawer and pushed one of the levers down. A barely audible click and sudden pressure against her thumb was all the indication the register gave that it was open. Only, judging by the rising shouts of “Get out!” from the owner made it clear she wouldn’t have time to scoop out the small heap of gold coins from the mahogany trays.

She hastily shoved her fingers into the back of the drawer, feeling for the catch that kept it from falling into the owner’s lap every time he used it. Coins jangled as she found it, jerked it up and over the lip of the register, and pulled the intact cash drawer clear of the machine. It wasn’t ideal but she could hear the stamping footsteps coming back toward the front of the store, and Knucks was keeping her voice raised so that Vik would know they were coming. A few pieces of gold bounced out and onto the wood floor when she hopped off the stool and she left them where they fell.

She was halfway across the sales floor when the fat dragon shoved Knucks through the stockroom door, still shouting for her to get out of his store before he summoned the militia to do it for him. Then his red eyes slid past Knucks and across the room to where Vik stood with his cash drawer clutched in both hands, and his chest swelled with an intake of breath as he prepared an enraged bellow.

His indignant roar rose to a piping squeal when Knucks spun and rammed her shin between his legs with a meaty thud. Internal genitals be damned, a swift kick to the nuts still hurt like the four hells through an inch or two of meat and the shop owner was still groaning on the floor as Vik and Knucks hurried out into the night, laughing with one another as they carried their little hoard of gold through the lamplit rain.

“Did you pack your toothbrush?”

Vik snorted and snugged the straps of her rucksack so it sat squarely between the joints of her wings. The contents of the bag stayed snugly where she’d packed them so she wouldn’t be serenaded by the clank and clatter of her belongings wherever she went. In front of her, the abandoned shanties of the Cinders stood silent sentinel while the sickly pine forest worried their branches together in the morning breeze.

As it so happened she had packed a toothbrush despite the likelihood of her ever needing it would be slim to zero. Externally, her new body was nearly indistinguishable from the original, but neither she nor Thimble had been very motivated to invent artificial digestion. The closest thing she had to a stomach was the small collection receptacle intended to temporarily store and recycle the mildly antiseptic saliva they’d designed to keep her mouth moistened. She hadn’t tested what would happen if she swallowed something that wasn’t her own saliva, nor was she interested in prying open her own chest cavity to scrub and disinfect it after she did. If someone out there invited her to dinner, she’d just decline until they gave up. Easy peasy.

The other necessities she’d organized in her bag could easily be separated into two categories: functional, and for show. The “for show” side of her kit amounted to the things she’d be expected to take with her if she still had an organic body with organic needs. Among these were a medium-sized first aid kit taken from Medical, one of the Stable’s canteens filled to the brim with water, half a dozen emergency rations she’d found down in Supply, a simple compass, and a folded up road map. The “functional” supplies she’d packed had been carefully hidden beneath a false bottom Thimble suggested she include in her bag. This included a simple tool roll, a tube of bonding solvent to close up wounds, an electrical repair kit in case something internal needed a quick fix, and a variety of small components to replace what she couldn’t fix.

“Yes, I packed my toothbrush,” she said, and felt an odd sense of freedom in knowing Thimble couldn’t see her rolling her eyes as she said so. It had been a long, long time since she’d ever had anything amounting to real privacy before. Sure, she’d given him carte blanche to connect to her visual feed whenever he liked, but she knew he’d just as readily disconnect if she asked. She had to admit, it would be nice being able to scratch her ass without Thimble’s digging for dragon gold wisecracks.

“Mouthwash?” he persisted in her ear. “Floss?”

“What’re you, my dentist?”

She reached experimentally with her right hand to the black handle sticking out from the docker’s clutch under her left arm. The kukri was snapped securely in place by a leather strip, and it bore the same short, curved blade as the one she and her brother wielded when they were young. Compared to the ornamental weapons they had been given, the one tucked under her left armpit was exceedingly simple. Just a hardened length of clean steel sharpened to a surgical edge on the inside curve. Chances were she’d never use it unless she decided to take up whittling, but knowing she had it gave her a sense of peace that she hadn’t been allowed when her father had begun counting down.

“Vik? You there, Vik?”

She blinked with a startled jerk, then looked down to see the kukri out of its scabbard and in her closed fist.

“A bunch of your stress indicators sort of took the express elevator to the top floor just then,” Thimble continued a little hesitantly. “You okay?”

“Just thinking about the bad old days,” she said, exhaling as she shoved the blade back into its scabbard a little harder than strictly necessary. “It’s fine.”

“Okay,” he replied, and the unease in his voice made it clear he wasn’t buying it, but that he wouldn’t push the issue either. “So… do you have a destination in mind?”

What was left of her smile slipped away as she considered the question. It had been more than two centuries since she and Pike had set their sights on making their way to the signal out of Manehattan, and they had been so close to leaving. Now all she knew for sure were the transmissions gathered in Millie’s old logs, and the whispers that only occasionally came over the airwaves. The Equestrian Army had long ceased to exist, replaced by something that called itself the Steel Rangers. There had been a second power for almost as long called the Enclave, but for the last twenty years any references made to them were all in the past tense. Their leader or deity - Vik hadn’t been able to decipher which - had gone missing or died, possibly due to the balefire detonation that occurred around the same time. The details were anyone’s guess.

Everything beyond the horizon was a mystery, now.

She took a slow, deep breath and let it out. “There’s only one road.”

“And it goes two ways,” Thimble gently chided.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “That it does.”

The sea breeze had steadily worn the ruins of Buckskin Bay down to the merest suggestion of what had once been. Vik’s feet barely made a sound as she walked through windworn streets that had cracked, fissured, and filled back in with the neverending onrush of sandy soil. If she looked closely, she could pick out the telltale signs left by the Cinders. Flattened structures that were slowly being reclaimed by the encroaching forest lay beside low heaps of excavated building materials, the best of which had been dragged up to Stable 48 to build their encampment.

Her first stop had been the closest. The old brick, two story apartment building Pike had helped pay for and furnish was just a long lump of rubble smoothed over by centuries of blown soil. She’d known there would be nothing there for her, but she wanted to see it all the same. For a few years it had been her home.

Eventually she found herself moving again, following what she thought might have been the same sidewalk she’d taken on her way to and from work. A few scraggly weeds clung to life in the low valleys of Central Avenue where the pavement had collapsed into the sewer. She found the remains of Seaside Hospital and Cryolife standing silent sentinel to the distant sea, two jagged hills that had long since been reclaimed by time. She discovered the excavated stairwell Millie’s spiders had cleared which had since fallen into itself again as the pile above it continued to settle. For a long while she’d stood there at the top of those earth-choked stairs and thought about digging her way down to the bottom. To Cold Storage, where Pike had laid her to rest and Millie had dragged her back to life.

She wanted to take something of his with her. A pair of his scrubs, his name badge, or even just his house keys if they were down there. She’d nearly walked down to start digging before she stopped and reminded herself that this was the closest thing she would ever have to a grave for him. So she only stood there, letting her eyes well up with wordless tears while she felt the worn corners of old regrets, then wiped them clear and turned the other way.

It took her some time to retrace the path they’d taken on their last expedition together. The snow had been up to her knees back then and she’d had to keep her eyes squinted against the blinding glare. She could still remember how the constant, nagging hunger had felt. How the junk they’d been eating to keep themselves alive never felt like real food. How they’d needed to ration everything they found so there would be enough to sustain them once they left for Manehattan in the spring.

Old worries gave way to darker thoughts as she finally found the flattened wreck of the house. Feathery white clouds passed under the sun in ribbons high overhead. The sky hadn’t been so blue back then.

The house had long ago finished folding in on itself. Its asphalt shingle roof had turned pale gray as the shingles grew brittle and broke apart in the relentless ocean wind. Now all that was left were a few rows of peeled, curling plywood half-buried beneath fine sand. Vik found the place where she remembered the front door having been and carefully climbed onto the ruins as she retraced her final steps. There had been a living room, and a couch, and photos on the wall of a family she’d never met. There’d been an archway into the kitchen, and the dining room had been… there.

Wood cracked and groaned beneath her feet as she knelt down. The nails that held them to the roof trusses were little more than rusty suggestions, and the boards came up with little effort. A dirty layer of insulation waited beneath them. She pulled out her kukri and sliced through the fiberglass, then the crumbling gypsum that used to be the dining room ceiling. When she reached the linoleum floor she began pulling up old framing in larger loads, heaving them up and throwing them aside as she searched.

She paused when she uncovered the first feather. Ripple’s feather. Working more slowly, she began to expose more of him. There were a few traces of desiccated tissue but not many. There were his ribs. His hipbone. His skull. All deformed by the weight of the ruins he’d been slain in. And there, mingled with the delicate bones of what must be his dominant wing, was the long barreled revolver he’d murdered her with.

Something deep within her recoiled at the sight of the gun, but something much stronger urged her to take it. Resheathing her knife, she leaned down and pried the weapon out of the shallow indentation its shape had pressed into the soft linoleum. Ripple’s bones offered no resistance as it popped free.

It occurred to her just then that there had always been a reason why she’d resisted fabricating a firearm for herself. Ammunition, yes, that would always be a dealbreaker. But there had been nothing stopping her from making a gun. There were even plans in the file library for simple revolvers just like this. Ones that would come out of the fabricators shining and freshly plated, even engraved if she so chose. But she already had a shiny new knife. What she wanted now was to take the instrument of death away from the prick who shot her six times through the chest in front of the only other person in this world she’d ever loved.

Ripple’s revolver was caked in rust where it had been exposed to the salt air. The other side was almost black with soil, but otherwise unscathed. It would probably never fire again, and that was fine by Vik. But she wouldn’t leave it here, with him.

“Wherever you are, I hope you’re burning,” she whispered to his skull, and dropped her heel through it with a brittle crunch. Then she shouldered off her pack, shoved his rusted revolver inside, and left his scattered bones to decay in his anonymous grave.

Vik glanced down at the corner of her HUD, expanding the persistently updating countdown.

4W:2D:9H:36M.

She and Thimble had debated which of their two remaining power cores Vik should take on her first expedition out into the world, and in the end it had come down to simple risk management. She was taking what she believed to be the most direct route to what she hoped was civilization. If she ran into something along the way that rendered her shiny android body nonfunctional, she’d want the other core with the longer charge on what would end up being a scenic route. Ideally, she’d never need the second core. Ideally, she’d stumble across a big shipping container stuffed to the ceiling with fully charged cores and solve the scarcity problem then and there.

Realistically, she knew that for every good turn the universe had gifted her, it gave her two bad turns to balance the scales. That was how it always was since the day she was discarded and she wasn’t about to pin her hopes on a streak of good luck just because it was what she needed.

The sun was rising somewhere off to her left. It would be a while longer before its yellow disc rose high enough to see above the surrounding hills, but the light it cast had already turned the wispy morning sky a deep golden red. She’d spent the entire night and most of yesterday afternoon walking roughly south down the winding remnants of Old Highway 10, and the ancient foothills of the Crystal Mountains had smoothed out into shallow valleys and gentle rises. The pine forest was still thick on either side of the road except for the barren spots where the dark of night exposed the places where crystal boulders had fallen, still emitting the menacing glow of hard radiation.

After passing too close to one of those dimly lit slumps of stone and seeing the sudden scattering of digital artifacts across her vision, she steered well clear of all the rest. She didn’t know much about radiation, as it had only been discovered shortly before the bombs fell, and what she did know centered around its capacity to make people seriously ill. She remembered seeing an article in a newspaper Pike had brought to work that talked about a wave of acute sickness that arose following an explosion in the mountains near the east coast. An explosion that was later believed to be Equestria’s first real balefire detonation, and possibly an accidental one at that, though no official sources ever came forward to confirm or deny the rumors.

She took a deep breath of pine-spiced air and let it out. “Good old Equestria. At least you had the decency to be ashamed of your screw ups.”

She half expected Thimble to chime in, but it was still early and he preferred to reserve the night hours for what he called quiet work. It was his way of retaining something resembling a sleep cycle, even though neither of them needed sleep anymore, and the idea was beginning to grow on her. They were both available to ask and answer questions if they needed a second pair of eyes on whatever they were working on, but they didn’t engage in idle chat as a courtesy. Thimble enjoyed it, and for Vik it sort of felt like an extended version of that first groggy half hour after she punched in. A kind of eight-hour-long don’t bug me until I’ve had my coffee period that substituted natural sleep.

It felt nice.

A few specimens of fauna made themselves seen over the course of that first full day on the road. She spotted what looked like a possum waddling across the fissured concrete a half mile away, only it looked like it had lost the majority of its fur except around its shoulders and was covered in what looked like open sores. A few small birds flitted between the trees. Finches, strangely enough. She didn’t remember seeing finches when she lived in Buckskin Bay and wondered about them now. She’d pulled out her kukri when she’d heard something big stomping through the underbrush too far away to see, but whatever it had been hadn’t seen or been interested in her enough to come closer and had lumbered away.

And then as the sun made its way down toward the western horizon she’d begun to notice the forest around finally giving way to wider clearings. The road ran directly through one such clearing where it intersected an old stream bed with murky green water still trickling between dirty stones. The road had partially collapsed after the steel culverts beneath it rusted away, and Vik had been judging whether she could jump the medium sized gap when her sensors indicated movement to her left.

She looked up to see a fully grown doe stepping out from the forest’s edge, and her coat was such a deep green that it was nearly black. The sheer strangeness of the sight was enough to make Vik forget about the road for several seconds. Beneath the darkening sky, the doe appeared to glow with an inner, emerald light. It reminded Vik of changelings, and she’d nearly begun looking for a way down into the field it was exploring when a second explanation arose in her mind. Balefire. And she was certain at that moment that the doe was irradiated and to approach it would mean exposure.

When she was past the broken section of road and nearing the point where the trees would once more swallow her path, she looked back to see the doe joined by a haggard looking buck. It wore half a crown of horns, and its eyes were turned toward her like green beacons. Vik hurried along down the road, eager to put the screen of sickly pines between her and the staring animals, because for the first time in her life she thought she understood what it felt like to be prey.

She was well into her third day of walking when she finally came across the first real sign of civilization. The great pine forest had finally given up its grip on the old road and what replaced it was a great, desolate expanse of abandoned farmland. There were still plenty of trees sprouting up in scattershot clusters, but the majority of the terrain was dominated by some kind of hearty scrub brush that looked just as happy to be dead as it did to be living. The barren fields were carpeted with patchwork yellow-green and dull brown shrubs interrupted occasionally by the odd heap of rotted boards where barns and farmhouses once stood. It was only when she spotted what looked like a stumpy dark tower on the horizon did she realize she was getting close.

The tower turned out to be the remnants of a prewar grain silo. The domed metal cap was missing and a deep crack ran halfway up the northern side, but it had somehow remained standing despite the years. It stood at the crossroads between Old Highway 10 and another road Vik didn’t recognize, but what had her attention were the layers of graffiti wrapping the silo like post apocalyptic gift wrap.

Some of it was old. Very old, judging by where some of the paint was only legible because the wind hadn’t eroded it out of the concrete’s deepest pores. There weren’t any of the taglines popular Equestrian horror movies taught her to look for. No “the end is nigh,” or “the dead are here,” or “the eternal nightmare hath come.” There were a few messages like that, though they were much less cryptic and many of them were downright silly.

“Fuck Vhanna,” she read aloud while tracing the messages with a finger as she walked around it. “Fuck the ministries. Fuck war.”

Zero points for creativity, Thimble sent via text, having opted for an extra layer of removal while he watched Vik’s visual feed. How do you fuck war?

She hadn’t the foggiest clue. There were plenty more fuck-related messages, many of which just repeated themselves around the full perimeter of the grain silo, but those weren’t the ones she was interested in. Two of them in particular caught her eye.

“Twilight was here,” she murmured, looking up at the faded purple letters beneath a cartoonish Twilight Sparkle peeking over the top of a long horizontal line. “Weird.”

Creepy is more like it, Thimble contributed.

Another quarter-turn around the wall, painted in dense black script a good twenty feet off the ground, several words stood above a thick black arrow pointing down the southern branch of the crossroad.

FREE CITY OF
PURGATORY FALLS
19 MILES

A duplicate of the same message graced the west-facing side of the silo. Curiously, she opened up a map of the region in her HUD and felt a little rush of excitement as it updated and quickly centered on her rough position at the intersection. She’d discovered the clever bit of mapping technology on one of the Pip-Bucks she’d unboxed years earlier and was pleasantly surprised when it promptly connected to a fistful of derelict satellites still in orbit. She wondered if Stable-Tec had paid to put them up there or if they were all property of JetStream Aerospace. Pike would know.

She pulled herself back to the present and scrolled south along the semi-opaque map. There was nothing where the painted signs said Purgatory Falls should be. The nearest marker eventually popped up almost ninety miles south and could just as likely be a town or a natural landmark the way ponies named the places they lived.

Shutting down the map, and not seeing anything to indicate a worthwhile destination on the east-west road, she shrugged, kicked her way out of the thick scrub brush, and resumed wandering south along Old Highway 10.

Just a few short miles past the silo, the road began running parallel with another anemic streambed and Vik began to wonder about that. After she first arrived in Equestria she thought the people of Buckskin Bay were conspiring to tease her with their insistence that their own pegasi moderated a large part of the weather that blew in over the ocean. She’d only believed it after Pike took her out on their lunch break to watch one of Canterlot’s weather teams fly in to break up an offshore storm just visible from the docks. Vik hadn’t understood how any of that worked. She knew if she flew into a squall and started kicking at clouds, she’d only tire herself out and make a fool of herself.

Pike had insisted it had something to do with Equestrian magic, and that explanation had bothered her for some time after. She hadn’t met a dragon who didn’t privately resent Equestria for its leg up on the competition in that regard, and it had been the work of deliberate intent not to heap her own resentment on Pike for being born a unicorn. Her attitudes toward magic users had mellowed over time thanks to his constant companionship, but she had never completely gotten over it. Instead she learned that jealousy was a valid response provided she was willing to let it go if the cause was out of anyone’s control. The universe dealt the cards it dealt, and being disappointed was a far cry from sulking over what the hands everyone else at the table got.

“Hey Thimble?”

His message popped up in her periphery. Yeah?

“Did Millie keep logs of the weather by chance? The farther I go, the dryer everything is starting to look. Almost like there’s a drought.”

The little icon appeared beside his message box to indicate he was checking her visual feed. Then it disappeared.

No weather records on file that I can find. Closest I can find are what look like monthly radiation readings set up by Stable-Tec. I wouldn’t worry, though. It’s only the second of March. We’ve got a couple more weeks of winter left.

She wrinkled her nose at that. Deep snow and bitter cold she could deal with. It was the end of winter she never liked because of how fickle the weather began to turn. In the span of a few days it would suddenly warm up, the pretty white snow drifts would get halfway through melting, then refreeze into ugly brown lumps when a cold snap blew through. Still, it beat the rainy season on the archipelago by a country mile.

Eventually the little stream bent away as the road lifted along the shallow rise of a hill that seemed to go up and up forever. It was the kind of hill that looked like nothing special at a distance and set your calves on fire before you were halfway to the top. Vik felt a little smug as she marched her way up the gentle incline without losing a step. On her way to the top she passed a sunbleached road sign announcing the next five miles of Highway 10 had been adopted by CMC Chapter #385. Vik didn’t know what a CMC chapter was or how it could adopt a road, but apparently it had.

A slow herd of puffy white clouds were making their way across the sky when she crested the hill. They dotted the dry landscape with slow moving shadows that followed the direction of the wind. It would have been a pleasant sight to look at if it weren’t for the eyesore downslope ahead of her. If it was what she assumed it had to be, Purgatory Falls was already living up to its cheery name.

For a while she just stood there at the top of the hill, unsure what to make of what she was seeing. It stood, like the grain silo, off to one corner of an intersection of two roads. Vik wouldn’t call what was down there a city. At best, it was a town. A small town, and maybe not even that.

A wall of some kind had been erected to encompass all but a few dirty brown buildings, and there had been an attempt at a gridwork of narrow streets to organize them which didn’t appear to have gone very well. A handful of larger structures near the center of the town spoiled the attempt at uninterrupted paths, all of which looked to be nothing more than packed dirt at this distance. Two sides of the outer wall pressed up against the cracked pavement of both highways, the entrances through which were marked by curves of dirt spilling out onto the roads where the majority of traffic appeared to pass in and out. Vik could see what had to be gates being guarded by a scattering of milling figures.

She was still too far to see their faces, but their body language exuded boredom even at this distance. And then, as if a switch had been thrown, they all began to stop at nearly the same time. A pair that had been lingering at the northern gate started moving away from their posts and out onto the empty highway, both very clearly looking up the long slope toward her. She’d been spotted. No surprise there. She couldn’t have picked a more exposed spot to stand than this if she’d tried.

“Suppose I should walk down there and say hello?” she mused.

Thimble’s wary voice crackled in her ear. “There’s a tree stump at your two o’clock, maybe ten yards into the grass. See it?”

Her easy smirk faltered at the tone of his voice, and she glanced in the direction he’d indicated. There, just off the road ahead of her, stood a roughly hewn stump maybe three feet tall. “I see it.”

“Get behind it.”

The volume on Bull’s radio had been turned down when the call came in, so he’d almost missed it when word came down from the wall that an immature deathclaw had been spotted sniffing around the crest of North Hill. But the report had come squawking out of half a dozen other radios in the bar and so Bull had reluctantly pushed himself up from his chair and followed all the other lookiloos out to take a look for himself.

Out on the dusty street and a little closer to drunk than buzzed, he lit his horn and tweaked one of the little black knobs on the salvage radio clipped to a strap beneath his jacket’s leather lapel. The perimeter guards were talking all over each other now, and he couldn’t help but grimace at the lack of comms discipline as he trotted past salvage shops and chem vendors on his way to the north wall.

“...still ain’t moved. Just staring–”

“...not fire on it unless you’re sure the matriarch–”

“...off the fucking chann–”

“...albino! If any of you fucks ruin that skin I’ll–”

“...get off the damned–”

“...forming a hunting party to track–”

“...Mercantile has first rights to the meat, you all remember–”

“...fucking morons clear the frequen–”

The crosstalk only grew worse as more and more voices tuned into the same channel, some of them trying to bark orders, some attempting to lay claim to the creature spotted by the sentries, and more than a few just yammering away on the frequency for the sake of being belligerent assholes. Such was life in Purgatory Falls, one of the few places in the wasteland that claimed to be a sovereign city and had the credentials to back it up.

Of course, Bull knew better than to trade his caps for that load of tripe. The only reason Purgatory Falls hadn’t gotten its gates kicked in by the Steel Rangers was because they were about as strategically and economically valuable as a brahmin turd and too far out of the way from anything of real importance to be worth worrying over. Between the Cinder Raiders and the local wildlife, one lawless town on the edge of nowhere was at the bottom of the Rangers’ list of worries. Then again, who knew? Maybe High Elder Silvertone could order a balefire bomb smuggled into the Cinders’ penitentiary just like the Enclave tried to do with Stable 10 twenty years ago.

And hey, if some vengeful Cinder pegasus flew out to New Canterlot to make Silvertone disappear without a trace afterward, maybe the Rangers could fill the spot with a real leader instead of a mouthpiece.

Bull tried to shrug off that particular dark thought as he pushed his way toward the crowded north gate and shouldered aside one of the sentries. His knees ached as he marched up the makeshift steps and onto the narrow walkway at the top of the wall. A few nearby guards shot him dirty looks, but he ignored them as he squinted at the tiny figure atop North Hill. He’d spent most of his adult life near deathclaw country and his immediate impression was that the thing watching them from its perch on the hill looked pretty small for a deathclaw. Even a juvenile would have more body mass than the fuzzy figure up there.

Someone on the radio was trying to order the wall sentries to shoot the critter before it disappeared back over the hill and a couple curious gate guards were already inching out onto the road, doubtlessly as much gauging the creature’s response as they were their fellow guards. But nobody ordered them to stop and the critter on the hill was moving toward an old tree stump near the ditch that the guards sometimes used to sight their rifles on.

Bull’s frown deepened when he thought he caught a glimpse of a wing. Rather than waste time asking if anyone else had seen it, he stepped toward the nearest wall sentry and met the young stallion’s eye. “Give me your binocs.”

The sentry started to size him up, then thought better of it and bowed his neck until the strap slid down and hooked on his uplifted foreleg. He held out his binoculars and Bull swept them up in his silver magic. It took a moment to reacquire the creature, now standing unsure behind the stump, but he only needed that moment to be sure.

“Get on the radio,” he told the sentry, pushing the binoculars into his chest as he turned for the stairs. “Wait, no. Belay that. Tell everyone on the wall to get hollering. Do not open fire. That is not a deathclaw, it’s–”

A crack of rifle shot cut through the air from where the sentries had ventured out into the road. And then, just like that, half a dozen guns on the wall joined the chorus.

“Does this mean I can stay?”

Vik tried not to look as afraid as she felt by pretending to focus on warming her hands above the little space heater. She and Knucks had transferred the coins from their recent heist into a handkerchief they’d found in the same dumpster they’d ditched the wooden drawer into before returning home. “Home,” in their case, was a corner of unused space in the back of a dock warehouse currently being used to store a surplus of donated clothing that nobody in the islands could wear. The space was dry, but the building wasn’t heated which meant between the bare concrete and cloudless nights it could get a little chilly.

Temperature swings weren’t that much of a problem for dragons, but survivable was a far cry from comfortable and cold was cold no matter how you sliced it. Vik had quickly learned that the little space heater made a big difference in how well she slept at night.

Her eyes remained on her warming hands, but her full attention was on the dragon seated cross-legged to her left. Fizzle was nearly done organizing her little haul of gold coins into neat columns of ten, then sliding each column off to one side as he built up the next. Knucks had assured Vik that her first attempt at proper thievery had gone well, but that the question of whether Vik could join their group had to be a unanimous decision. She had Knucks’ vote, and Croaker had been on board with taking her on when he discovered that she loved fish as much as he did. But Fizzle had made it clear he wouldn’t support Vik joining up if she couldn’t carry her own weight.

He placed the final coin on its stack with a bright click, then regarded her from the corner of his eye. “You did this by yourself?”

She almost said yes before stopping herself. “No, Knucks was with me to help. She distracted the owner while I opened the register.”

Fizzle lifted a brow toward Knucks, dipping his snout to indicate Vik. “She being honest?”

“Yep. The kid knows a thing or two about those old timey brass registers. Popped it open without the bell going off.”

To that end, Vik produced a narrow sliver of metal and held it out to Fizzle to look at. The words Equestrian Cash Register Co. were stamped across its steel surface. “For the bell lock. I took it before we left.”

Fizzle plucked the little key from her palm and looked it over. “Planning on hitting the same store twice with this? Wouldn’t recommend that.”

Vik shook her head. “My dad told me once that ECR put identical locks in all their old registers to save gold. Or bits, I guess. That key will silence any register from the same manufacturer.”

Her heart was thumping hard in her chest as she waited for him to react. For several long seconds, he didn’t say anything. He only stared at the little key, then walked it across his knuckles like a well practiced coin trick before pinching it between his thumb and forefinger and holding it out to her. “Okay.”

She licked her lips, willing herself not to accept the key until she knew what she was agreeing to by taking it. “Okay, what?”

The corner of his lip twitched with the slightest hint of a smirk. “Okay, you’re in.” And with that, he pressed the key into her palm and pushed himself to his feet before she could do anything but stare up at him, dumbfounded. “Knucks, since half of this is technically your haul, you get to take Vik out to the shops tomorrow to pick out her kit. Fair?”

Knucks was grinning wide. “Fucking right, it’s fair.” Then she put an arm around Vik’s shoulder and gave her a hearty squeeze. “You heard that, right? You’re with us now!”

Something strange was happening in Vik’s throat. It had gone all gummy, and her eyes stung. She opened her mouth to say something only to close it quickly, settling for a vigorous nod instead.

“Oh,” was all Knucks said before pulling her into a proper hug. “It’s alright, kid. Nobody wants their big brother to be ugly, but Fizzle can’t help it.”

Vik let out a half-laugh, half-sob. She didn’t trust herself with words just then.

Not waiting for the hug to end, Croaker’s wide palm clapped her on the shoulder. “Welcome to the family, Vik.”

“Oh, fuck all of this!”

Vik shouted as a barrage of high velocity projectiles whizzed past or thumped into the stump at her back. The air crackled with nearby gunfire as it seemed the entire population of Purgatory Falls had come out to take pot shots at their unwelcome company. The only reason she didn’t hoist both her middle fingers up for them to see was the vivid memory of having her finger shot off by Rook, and that had hurt like all the hells before she cut off the pain input. Being shot to pieces may not kill her, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t feel every single bullet as they ricocheted around her insides like the world’s least fun game of pinball.

As if to emphasize her point, a triple burst of rounds slapped through the scrub grass beside her feet with an audible thwip-thwip-thwip that caused significant parts of her anatomy to clench.

“Thimble, I could use suggestions!”

His answer was as immediate as it was unhelpful. “You need to move to better cover.”

She threw up her hands and nearly regretted it as a high caliber round buzzed near her fingers. “Well fuck me, why didn’t I think of that? There is no better cover!”

“Then you need to make a run for the other side of the hill and put it between you and them. There was a copse of trees near the bottom. Run for them when you’re clear of their line of fire and keep on running until they give up chasing you.”

She grit her teeth at the steady crack of what must have been a shotgun or maybe a cannon like Thimble’s power armor wielded. Whatever it was, she did not like being on the explodey side of it one fucking bit. “I really don’t want to get shot again. I know if I run for it, I’m going to get shot again. I have a doctor’s note that says I’m very fucking allergic to being shot, Thimble.”

“Says the dragon I remember telling me that going outside was like playing an arcade game with infinite lives. Embrace the suck, Vik. We can work out a plan to recover that mech if you end up losing it. Now turn down your pain receptors and get ready to make a break for it.” After a pause, he began to count. “On three. Three… two…”

The booming thunder of the shotgun cannon thing again, and in its wake all the other gunfire began to ease off.

“One… go!”

Vik had her palm pressed flat against the stump, poised to shove off and start running for the hill’s crest. Only the barrage of fire had gone quiet. Even the echoes had faded.

“Vik,” Thimble pressed, “I said go! That’s your cue to, you know, go!”

“Hold on,” she murmured. “They stopped.”

“Because ammunition is a finite resource,” he snapped impatiently. “They’re probably coming to check if you’re dead. This would be a fantastic time for you to hustle your scaly bustles.”

Toward the direction of the walled town, she could hear a single voice shouting what sounded like commands. It was the deep, masculine voice of a stallion. One that she could hear cracking, as if the speaker wasn’t used to the fine art of hollering. Taking a risk, Vik pushed her back higher up the stump until she was able to peek one eye over the splintered cut. She could see the town and its sort of but not quite square wall, as well the loose crowd of small figures that had gathered and spread out along the road in front of the north gate.

The lenses fitted where her retinas used to be emitted a faint whisper as they zoomed in on the figure that had pushed his way out of the gate and divided the attention of those who had just been shooting at her. He was a large stallion, even by equine standards, with a uniformly black coat and a white, unkempt mane. A large weapon floated beside him in a haze of magic which he kept pointed straight up at the sky.

“I think we found their version of Rook,” Thimble commented.

“Pretty sure he’s shit bigger turds than Rook.”

Whoever he was, he clearly was not in charge. More than a few of the others, including the sentinels in their loose assortment of makeshift armor, were shouting back at him in open defiance of whatever commands he was trying to give. When an earth pony nearby pushed to the edge of the crowd and took aim with what looked like a submachine gun clenched between her teeth, the stallion let his own weapon drop so he could wrap his magic around the mare’s gun and wrench it from her jaw. That sparked an even more animated shouting match between him and several more of his fellow citizens, which he quickly ended when he retrieved his weapon and fired a single, booming shot into the sky.

When he had their renewed attention, he briefly turned to address the crowd and said… something to make them hesitate. Vik tried to parse what he was saying, but he was too far downhill and wasn’t speaking loudly enough for her to pick anything out. Even her fancy new body had its limits.

That gave her an idea, and she quickly popped open the to-do list to pencil it in.

Thimble caught it immediately. “Really?”

She offered a half-shrug, which of course he couldn’t see. “Why not? Could be fun.”

“You’ll give someone nightmares for the rest of their life if they see that.”

With all the nobility she could muster, she said, “That’s just a risk I’ll have to take.”

Meanwhile, the elder stallion with the big black shotgun had evidently decided he’d made his point with the local rabble and had begun making his way across the highway and into the patchy expanse of weeds at the bottom of her hill. He kept the shotgun propped against his shoulder as he picked his way around ruts and stones exposed by erosion, pausing near each stump he passed in case he’d need his own cover.

Vik kept one eye on him, knowing as he drew closer that he could probably see her peeking at him over the top of her stump. She could feel her hand sliding unconsciously toward the hilt of her kukri. In a few more seconds he would cross an invisible line where the advantage of his firepower would be negated by the time it would take him to bring his weapon to bear and use it. The blade made a soft scraping sound as she pulled it from its sheath beneath her armpit, readying herself to rush him should he give her no choice.

He came to a stop a little less than twenty feet away from where she hid, making no attempt to hide the fact that he was watching her. When he spoke, he sounded winded. Up close, she could see that his largeness wasn’t all muscle. Most of it was, but there was also the subtle softening of middle age in his features. Like someone who was past building muscle and starting in on the years when most of his workouts were to keep what he had from turning into fat.

“So,” he said, pausing to suck down a fresh breath. “Folks down there think you might be a deathclaw.”

She narrowed her eyes at him from behind her protective stump. “That supposed to be an insult?”

For whatever reason, the stallion broke into a relieved grin. “Ah. I guess that depends on who you ask. What I know for certain is that deathclaws aren’t known for their conversation skills. That, and they don’t have wings. You’re a dragon, aren’t you?”

“Last I checked.”

“Well shit,” he half chuckled. “Last anyone checked, dragons were an extinct species.”

Vik pursed her lips into a frown and glanced down the clearcut where the rest of the gentle pony townsfolk were milling around with all manner of weaponry in tow. “Yeah, well, you horses always did like using overwhelming firepower to solve problems.”

It sort of impressed her when he ignored the jab. “Mm. So. Who’re you with?”

She eyed him with suspicion. “None of your business.”

At that, his easy grin faltered. “You’re not helping yourself by being obstinate.”

“You shot at me.”

He nodded, conceding the point. With a nod, he indicated the others gathered downhill. “Try not to hold it against them. They pegged you for a juvenile deathclaw and whipped themselves into a frenzy. We don’t see many this far from the badlands. Deathclaws, that is. Dragons, well, speaking only for myself, you’re the first I’ve ever seen that wasn’t on the movie screen or in a history book.”

There was that deathclaw comment again. She needed to figure out what they were so she could do something to prevent herself from being mistaken for one again.

“Where did you come from?” the stallion asked.

Crystal Empire, Thimble sent in her periphery.

It was as good a lie as any. “The Crystal Empire, or what’s left of it. Are they going to shoot at me if I stand up?”

He clearly wanted to press her for more about where she claimed to have come from, but some other part of him was even less comfortable with the idea of being seen cornering a non-threat that his people had just tried to kill. “Probably not,” he allowed. Then, seeing her sour expression, he checked himself. “I suppose you really aren’t from around here, are you?”

“Fresh off the boat,” she agreed.

“Fresh off…” he wrinkled his muzzle at the unfamiliar expression, then shook his head and pressed on. “They’ve all seen me chatting at you long enough to figure you’re not what they thought. That’s not to say you should trust any of them. This is the wasteland, after all. But it’s probably safe enough for you to stand without catching a bullet.”

After a tense couple of seconds, Vik resheathed her kukri and slowly rose to her feet. She could feel the stallion’s immediate, assessing gaze as he noted the light kit she carried. And of course, his hazel gaze lingered on the hilt of her knife for half a beat longer than the rest of her before he turned to regard the town below.

“So,” he said, “what’s your business in Purgatory?”

“Traveling,” she answered, and when he gave her a curious look, she continued. “I’m looking for a place to live that isn’t… where I came from, I guess.”

At that, he laughed. “Well, you picked a hell of a place to start. I’ll tell you right now, Purgatory Falls is a shithole. Plenty better places to look than here.”

She adjusted the strap of her pack as she scanned the dusty brown buildings within the wall. Then her attention drifted to the stallion’s hip where, in the place where his mark should have been, five evenly spaced numerals stood out from his charcoal coat in stark white: 41997.

There was a story to that, but the way he stiffened under her gaze made it clear he wasn’t about to tell it to her. Oh well. She was pretty sure she could drink him under the table with all the secrets she had.

She nodded toward the town. “If it’s so bad, then why do you live here?”

His only answer to that was a polite smile. “My name’s Bull. You?”

“No, my name’s not Bull,” she replied. She couldn’t help it. Honest. “People call me Vik.”

“You planning on causing any trouble down there, Vik?”

She offered a noncommittal shrug. “Not especially.”

“Good to hear,” he said, then tipped his head down in the direction of Purgatory Falls. “Before you fly off to parts unknown, how about I give you the grand tour?”

Chapter 8: Compass Points

Being led through the squeaky north gate of Purgatory Falls gave Vik flashbacks to the day she first landed in Buckskin Bay. It had been like dropping into the center of a sea of eyeballs as heads craned toward her, then following her as she stumbled up the grassy pavilion and through the emergency room doors of Seaside Hospital. She remembered how her appearance had caused an older mare in a nurse’s uniform to cry out in shock. How the security guards and other nurses who came running were all of the sudden unsure what to do with this exhausted, blood-smeared dragon that had just dropped into their lives.

She remembered how one of them had been unwilling to touch her body and simply pointed a hoof the empty gurney someone was bringing out to the waiting area where Vik wobbled on unsteady legs. How she’d had to climb onto it herself, then nearly fell out before Pike appeared at her side with his horn lit and his magic bracing her armpits until she was safely aboard the gurney.

They hadn’t all looked at her like she was some uncollared, wild animal. But it was usually the first thing she saw in their eyes before they could put on their polite masks and ask their benign questions. She wasn’t so proud to pretend it hadn’t stung. And that was why, as the bewildered ponies of Purgatory Falls cleared a path through the gate for her and Bull, she wondered why their shameless stares didn’t bother her now.

Instead of worrying about it, she hiked up her pack and kept close to Bull as he led the way through the crowd.

“This here’s what most folk just call the Drag,” he was saying, doing a little skip-step on three hooves as he gestured at the dirt street she’d seen bisecting most of the town.

She noticed a lot of the buildings here were built in the same loose, ramshackle way the Cinders had put theirs together. There was evidence of some wooden framing here and there, likely the reason why the hills around town were dotted with old stumps, but the people who lived here seemed just as happy to shore up their four walls with metal fence posts and baling wire as they were with real building materials. They passed a storefront, or a house, or maybe both rolled into one that looked like it was a stiff breeze away from folding over flat. Probably it would have if the building next to it wasn’t already taking up some of the load.

A hung sign made from an old steel drum lid had something written across it in smeared chalk that Vik had to squint to read.

Rare and Unusual Trinkets
Buy - Sell - Appraised
NO TRADES, CAPS ONLY

“If you’re looking to rent a room for the night, you could do worse than any you’ll find on the Drag.” Bull nodded toward a genuine buckboard wagon, the kind Equestria used to be known for before motorized carriages took over, parked at the side of the road. Standing between the traces, an earth pony chatted idly with a pegasus as they waited for a team of workers to finish unloading what appeared to be crates of rusting junk. “Plenty of quick work to be found, too, if you’re short on funds.”

As he said this, the work crew at the wagon caught sight of Vik and one of the heavy crates slipped through a unicorn’s magic and fell with a crash of splitting boards. She didn’t have to listen hard to catch the word “deathclaw” pass a few of their lips, and her hand instinctively rose an inch closer to the curved blade sheathed beneath her left arm.

Oblivious to her rising tension, or just choosing not to acknowledge it, Bull kept speaking as if nothing were amiss. He indicated the wide, two-story building at the center of the road just ahead, and she noticed the bright orange and yellow curtains adorning each window like advertisements. She’d seen it from the hilltop, what Bull called North Hill, and knew there would be another building of similar size just behind it. Whatever they were, they’d been important enough to cut the Drag clear in half.

“Up there’s the Honey Hole,” he said, his voice carrying the faintest trace of discomfort. “What accounts for our town hall and jailhouse is right behind it, though it mostly serves as an auction house on the rare day we see a trader caravan.”

Vik sidestepped a suspiciously wet patch of the dirt path while trying not to look as overwhelmed as she felt. “What’s a Honey Hole?”

Bull glanced at her with one salt and pepper brow lifted in silent question. Vik actually had to make an effort not to look away. He was tall. Enough that his hazel eyes drew up even with her own. She couldn’t deny Bull’s physical presence was a little intimidating.

“It’s the whorehouse,” he said, and apparently that was all he was going to say on the subject because in the next breath he changed the subject. “There’s a public well over by the east wall. Lot of sulfur deposits in this area so the water tends to be foul if you don’t boil it. It’s pretty easy to find, so don’t ask for directions to it unless you’re willing to part with a few caps first.”

There was that word again. “And what are caps?”

And all of the sudden he was eyeing her again. “You weren’t kidding when you said you weren’t from around here. Bottlecaps. It’s money. Your people do have money, right?”

She eyed him right back. “Of course we do. Bottlecaps are just… garbage, though. We use gold. Last I heard, Equestria used gold, too.”

Bull grunted noncommittally. “Not since the bombs fell. If you’ve got a stash of old Equestrian bits in your bag, you can probably find a scrap trader willing to buy them for the metal. They won’t net you that much but it’ll be less weight to lug around the wasteland.”

She tried to find the loose thread in his words that would give away the scam, but if his angle was to screw her over he wasn’t following through by recommending a friend or offering to take her coin himself. She almost wished she’d fabricated a few bits to take with her just to see if he was serious. But as he continued showing her around and she kept seeing roughly made signs advertising various goods and services - all of which listed their prices in bottlecaps - she began to accept that he probably wasn’t yanking her chain.

He led her past the Honey Hole where Vik spotted more than a few decorated mares and stallions looking pleasantly bored as they stood within a few easy steps of the brothel’s front door. The door itself had been painted bright red and sported a frosted pane of glass that looked like a transplant from a militia recruitment office.

Bull was rattling off facts about the combination town hall, jail, and auction house when her attention was pulled toward what looked to her like a framed photo just hanging beside the door of what appeared to be a tavern. The door was propped open with a wedge of wood, and a few watery-eyed gazes went wide with confusion when she drifted toward the plank boardwalk along the roadside to look at the picture.

Behind a cracked pane of glass, an officious looking mare looked out with a beneficent, close-lipped smile. Her blue mane hung from her neck in gentle, precise curls that hinted at many hours spent teasing them into place. The sun had bleached the photo, but Vik could still see the hints of pink in the mare’s coat and the dull, brick red eyes that gave her portrait a feeling of being seen by someone who was used to thinking five moves ahead of everyone she encountered.

“Wouldn’t waste your time on that,” Bull said from the road. “Every bounty hunter, scavenger, and Steel Ranger in the wasteland has been looking for her for twenty years.”

Below the photo, partially obscured by the frame, were the stark black letters of a wanted poster. Wanted alive, and for a sum of caps that spanned six digits long.

“What did she do?” Vik asked as she rejoined him in the street.

“She killed a lot of people,” was apparently all he would say on the matter, because his next words came out of nowhere. “You thirsty?”

After a moment of hesitation, she jerked a thumb at her pack. “I have water.”

He frowned at her like she’d just said something painfully stupid. “Wasn’t asking about water. I figured you might want something a little stronger. I know a place on the west side of town that’ll let us sit and talk without charging us for the chair.”

Part of her wanted to respond with something sarcastic, but she had a feeling that Bull’s offer didn’t come with strings attached. At least not the strings that usually came with a strange male offering to buy her a drink. Funny how she hadn’t needed to worry about that since being chased off the islands.

Another thought came to mind on the heels of the first. She couldn’t drink anything. Granted, she had a mouth and throat, but those were more necessary for natural speech than consumption. Everything beyond that was less equipped for digestion and intended more to store and recycle her synthetic saliva. She could probably sip on water without breaking anything, but she was pretty sure if she knocked back a bottle of Griffinstone ale she’d regret it when her filtration system turned into one big petri dish.

“I wouldn’t say no to finding a place to take a load off, but I’ll take a raincheck on the drink.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and led her onto a side street between a pair of buildings that would have made the narrow alleyways in Howl jealous. “Best to get off the Drag for a little while and let the local yokels cool their hooves. Besides, you may not be thirsty but I for damned sure could use a drink.”

The bar he led her into was a disappointing little hole in the wall whose owner had attempted, unsuccessfully, to replicate the kind of small town taverns that seemed to crop up everywhere back on the islands.

Along one long wall several chrome and glass paned display cases that looked like they belonged in a jewelry store had been set end to end with runs of scrap wood placed evenly along the top to form the physical bar. An old terminal sat in the corner on a pedestal made from a wooden apple crate. A prewar Equestrian movie was playing on the screen, the volume just loud enough to echo a little. Inside the glass bar were an eclectic arrangement of colorful empty bottles, barware, and nicknacks all lit by strands of holiday lights someone had glued in wavy patterns along the inside glass. A line of mismatched stools, none of which were currently occupied, waited to be filled while a bored looking bartender skimmed the pages of a yellowed magazine.

Six stained and unadorned tables ran the length of the opposite wall, and Bull grunted a greeting to the bartender as he pushed inside and claimed the table furthest from the door. The bartender, a stallion who looked to be pushing sixty and wore himself in a manner that suggested he might be the owner of the unnamed establishment, glanced up over the top of a smudged pair of reading glasses and frowned when his eyes slid right past him to fall on Vik.

“Dragon,” Bull said, as if that somehow clarified everything, and the old bartender’s irritated grunt was all he said on the topic. “I’ll have a brandy smash.”

“And him?”

“Her,” Vik corrected before she could stop herself, but the bartender just shrugged as if that wasn’t something he cared to know. “Nothing, thanks.”

“Fine,” he grumbled, turning jaundiced eyes back to Bull. “Ain’t got no oranges left.”

Bull said it was fine, and the old stallion turned to retrieve the requisite ingredients from the shelves behind the bar. Vik noticed with some trepidation that the bartender was an earth pony who seemed to be unwilling or unable to carry, open, or pour out his liquor without the use of his mouth. She’d seen earth ponies in Buckskin Bay make use of their hooves and forelegs well enough and wondered if she should say something, but if Bull seemed to care at all he made no indication.

After a few minutes of slow work, the stallion cleared his throat at Bull. “Eight caps.”

She watched the exchange with quiet fascination as Bull lit his horn and produced eight scuffed, slightly bent bottle caps from the small satchel he wore over his hip. He didn’t get up, and the bartender seemed at this point incapable of taking offense. He simply floated the caps onto the bar on a shimmering, silver stream, then beckoned the glass to the table.

Before he could close his satchel, Vik pointed a finger at it and held her open palm out. “Mind if I look at one?”

Bull obliged without comment and she turned the disc of stamped steel back and forth between her fingers. A few spots of rust had begun to form along one crimped edge, but the purple and white logo was virtually untouched. Her face fell with instant recognition.

“Sparkle-Cola? Really?”

She flicked the cap back at him, which he caught with his magic and dropped into his satchel. “Not a fan, eh?”

“I’m not sure how anyone is. It’s like drinking a five pound sack of sugar.”

Bull responded by lifting his glass and taking a deep swig. By the way he carried himself, she would have bet gold on him ordering something more… classic. Whiskey, maybe. Not something with a dried mint leaf and a canned cherry floating in it. Hells, throw in the orange it was missing and he might as well be drinking a fruit cocktail.

After another swig that left the glass a little below half empty, he spoke. “So. Tell me what you know about the wasteland.”

She feigned thoughtful consideration, propping an elbow on the moisture warped table top so she could scratch her lip with the back of her thumb’s trimmed claw. It wasn’t entirely an act, either. How she answered now would define how the rest of their conversation went, and she had her doubts that the next pony she met would be this willing to clue her in on everything she’d missed.

“I know the bombs fell two hundred forty years ago,” she began, deciding not to mention anything she and Thimble had learned from Millie’s logs or by listening to the transmissions picked up by the Stable’s receivers. “And I found out today that some of you made it out the other side of it alive. And that you use bottle caps for money.”

Bull frowned. “That’s it?”

She offered a weak shrug. “I’ve only been here a few days. You’re the first people I’ve come across since leaving–”

Crystal Empire, Thimble reminded her via text.

“–what’s left of the Crystal Empire.”

Bull’s eyebrows lifted at that. There was no mistaking he didn’t believe her, but after a few tense seconds he appeared to be content to let the lie pass.

The bar’s front door creaked open, followed by the rapid staccato of small hooves making their way across the floorboards. Bull glanced past Vik, noted the newcomer with a nod, then rolled his eyes and indicated Vik should look as well.

She hooked an arm over the back of her chair and looked back to see a gangly young colt standing stock still halfway between where she sat and the door he’d come in through. Her first instinct was to smile - with minimal teeth of course, since she’d learned those tended to spook younger ponies - then felt her brow begin to furrow as she saw how utterly wrong the little earth pony looked.

His coat was almost entirely gone, save for a strip of mangy yellow fur down the side of his neck and covering his right foreleg in thin patches. The rest of him was all knotted, pink skin that made Vik think of the fried meat sold by street vendors on Howl Island. He looked burned, but she didn’t know how anyone could survive burns that severe. He would have needed an entire other pony just to graft on new skin, and she had her doubts that anyone living in Purgatory had better medical resources than a bottle of aspirin.

Worst yet, she realized part of his cheek had either rotted away or had been peeled off. She could see the sides of his teeth and gums through the gristle of his jaw. The kid should be dead. That was all she could think.

The kid should not be alive.

Then it talked. It looked straight at her and said, “Peanut said you’re a talkin’ deathclaw. Ain’t never seen no talkin’ deathclaw before.”

The words tumbled from his mouth sounding phlegmy and dry at the same time. Vik didn’t know what to say. Thimble apparently didn’t either, because nothing appeared from him in her HUD. The two of them were as dumbstruck as the little burned colt was defiant.

“She’s a dragon, Chippy,” Bull eventually supplied, before adding a little sympathetically. “Go easy on her. I think you’re her first ghoul.”

Chippy, because of course the walking talking corpse child was named Chippy, squashed his muzzle into a horrifying expression of childlike disbelief. “Mom said all the dragons is dead.”

“Apparently they aren’t,” Bull gently countered. “Say hi, Vik.”

She blinked once, then forced herself to nod. “Hi, Vik.”

In an instant, the wiry colt’s expression brightened with a scraping little laugh of surprise. “That’s funny!”

He kept on laughing his strange laugh while Vik turned back to face Bull, hoping he’d pick up on her discomfort. She’d thought the kid was afraid of her, but now she wasn’t sure if she’d gotten that the wrong way around. When she left the Stable she assumed the world that survived the bombs would take some adjusting to, but this felt like she was meeting the little haunted child that appeared in the empty hallway of every cliche horror movie. All he was missing was a formal little suit and a thousand mile stare while he beckoned her to come play surgery in daddy’s workshop.

The colt was still laughing when the old bartender thumped a hoof against the bar’s glass case. “Kid. Quit bugging the customers and go put your apron on. Dishes need doing.”

At that, Chippy shot the bartender a petulant scowl before trotting obediently past the table where they sat, pausing once to get a good look at Vik before continuing through a door leading into a back room. Vik found herself staring after the kid, still trying to make sense of what she’d just seen.

Bull drank off the last of his brandy, then sent the empty glass back to the bar with an audible double tap against the wood. Eight more caps followed, and without a word the bartender started refilling his drink. When he had the fresh refill in front of him again, he looked across the table at her with a vaguely lopsided smile.

“Never seen one of them before, huh?”

It took her a moment to find the right words. “I guess not. Is he okay?”

“Ghoul,” the bartender growled from behind his magazine. “Kid soaked up too many rads too quick. Got lucky, though. Didn’t die. Didn’t turn feral. Kid’s probably gonna outlive Celestia and do nothing but slack off for every year of it.”

It was the most she’d heard the bartender say since they arrived, and it appeared to be all he would say now that his attention was sliding back toward what looked like a very old nudie magazine. Luckily Bull was ready to pick up the thread.

“You didn’t have anything like ghouls where you came from?”

She shook her head. “Should he be working in his condition?”

Bull snorted, nodding at the bartender as he spoke. “Chippy’s probably been around longer than Lark and I combined.”

“I ain’t that young,” the bartender, Lark apparently, muttered. “And you ain’t that old, Bull.”

“Then why do my knees hurt in the morning?” he countered.

“Because your mummy was a brick shithouse and your pappy was the bulldozer that knocked her over. That’s why.”

Bull raised his glass and took a long swig, surrendering the point. “Anyway, nobody really knows how ghouling works. All anyone can be sure about is that the ponies who get it end up sticking around past their expiration date. They live longer, maybe forever. And they don’t age. They just… fall apart. Some get it worse than others, like Chippy back there. He’s going to be seventy…?”

“Seventy five,” Lark finished. “This December, or so he says. Kid’s always been fuzzy with dates, but he says he met Elder Patch and that fella got killed by an Enclave firebomb back when I was still nibbling my mum’s teat.”

He has a way of painting pictures, Thimble sent.

Agreed, she sent back.

She couldn’t think of anything else to add, so she closed the tiny window and tried to reorient herself in the conversation. So much was hitting her at once that she was beginning to feel that vague numbness she got when her limbics kicked into higher gear. It was how she’d felt when she booted back up shortly after discovering Millie had tried to manipulate her into slaughtering the Cinders.

I think I need to turn off my limbics, she finally sent him.

Not now, he fired back so quickly it was almost as if he’d anticipated the thought. Somewhere private. Trust me, not now.

She nodded once, not checking to see if he was watching her feed, and tried to pick up where she left off.

“That kid is seventy four years old,” she said slowly, and felt her stomach drop when Bull said that was right. “But he acts like he’s a kid.”

“As far as he’s concerned, he is a kid. He’s just… been one for a very long time.” Seeing her incomprehension, he tried to clarify. “He turned ghoul when he was ten or eleven. When that happens, it’s a lot like sticking a rod in a movie reel. The movie gets stuck on one frame and never moves. Ghouling freezes up bodies the same way. They stop aging, but they also stop maturing. On paper, Chippy’s a septuagenarian, but in his mind he’s still a ten year old kid.”

Vik’s chair let out a creak as she settled back into it. “That’s horrible.”

Lark chuffed a short laugh. “Chippy don’t think so.”

She looked to Bull for confirmation. He just shrugged and nodded. “He’s a kid, but he’s a kid with a lot of perspective. You tell him a fart joke and he’s liable to piss himself laughing, but you tell him he’s got some kinda curse and he’s liable to trade you for enough unvarnished truth to make you wish you’d kept your mouth shut.”

Vik frowned down at her laced fingers and tried to find a way to fold everything she was learning into everything she thought she knew, and found she couldn’t do it. It was too foreign. Like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, she couldn’t make it fit. Life was life. Death was death. And she found that the more she thought about it, the more she was beginning to hate it.

Only Millie’s limbics weren’t letting her feel any of it, and it reminded her of the distant, glazed look her mother had the day she’d been discarded.

Desperate for something else to talk about, she changed the subject. “Who was the mare in the wanted poster?”

Bull blinked surprise at that, then took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Big question. I don’t think you’ll like the answer. You sure you don’t want to talk about something else? I can tell you how the scrap market works.”

But she was intrigued now, and that was all it ever really took to hook her. She’d always been that way. Toss her a crumb and she wanted the whole cookie. Give her a box of matches and a couple firecrackers, she’d blow off her finger with one and still want to light the second. Pike once told her how raccoons would stick their little paws in a trap and refuse to let go of the marble they’d grabbed even as they watched the hunter walking up to them with a loaded rifle, and Vik had found herself relating to the poor raccoon.

“You said people have been after her for twenty years. What did she do?”

She watched Bull’s face darken as she asked the question. He hunched over his drink, his expression distant as the silence between them stretched. Then, when she started to think she’d be better off hearing about those scrap markets he mentioned, he began to speak.

“Her name was Primrose. She was the minister of the Enclave, back when there was an Enclave.” In one long pull, he drained his brandy and set the empty glass down on the table with a soft tok. He met her gaze, and there was a deep melancholy behind his eyes as he spoke. “She’s the reason we all live like this. Not the zebras. Not the ministries.”

He nudged the empty glass away and leaned back in his chair. “Vhanna never got a hold of balefire tech like folks believed back then. Equestria had them all, and Primrose just so happened to be the bitch who pushed the button.”

Vik spent the rest of the evening alternating between asking questions and listening to Bull talk. It turned out that Bull had a lot he wanted to get off his chest regarding the state of things and how Equestria - what he insisted everyone just called the wasteland - had gotten there. While Bull spoke, Lark refilled his drink three more times before finally taking his empty glass and firmly refusing to top it off again.

By then, Bull had been rambling with a faint slur. Vik wasn’t sure whether to be impressed that he managed to stay as composed as he was after five brandies or worried. Still, as curious other patrons wandered in and out of the bar, less to slake their thirst and more to stare at her, and as Bull nursed a glass of water so thick with minerals that it was visibly yellow, he seemingly told her everything there was to know about the wasteland since the bombs dropped.

He started by confirming the things she and Thimble had already begun to suspect. For a couple of decades, the Equestrian Army had tried their best to rebuild old bases of operations or construct new ones near large groups of survivors whom they expected to bolster their fractured ranks. There had been some notable reconstruction efforts along the eastern coast, with the Manehattan suburbs and Fillydelphia city center being chief among them. The capital city of Canterlot, which had slid down the mountain slope in a colossal landslide, had been a complete loss. All the while, communications across Equestria continued to deteriorate as pockets of survivors abandoned the infrastructure they’d been struggling to maintain with dwindling resources.

Those had been the parts Thimble had been alive for, though he told Vik it felt more than a little strange to be hearing the reports and rumors he’d known about then told like they were ancient history. For her part, Vik couldn’t say she was feeling much of anything outside of simple curiosity. Bull was really settling into the rhythm of his lecture by now, and more than a few strays from outside the bar were lingering in their stools to listen to the stallion talk.

He told her how the Equestrian Army had seemed to discover what Bull called their moral obligation to protect the common citizens from the very technologies that led them into the global war that nearly destroyed everything. It was from the army that the Steel Rangers had been born, whose first duty was to retrieve, secure, and control the use of all forbidden technologies.

Before long, he was telling Vik about the Enclave and their cultlike fanaticism surrounding one Minister Primrose. He explained how the most loyal members of the Enclave came to believe Primrose had been chosen by the princesses to carry the mantle of immortality and use it to guide Equestria out of the ruins the bombs had left behind. Primrose and her Enclave eventually rose to such power that they’d been able to prosecute a war against the Steel Rangers which led to the Enclave’s containment inside a limited, yet impenetrable sphere of influence centered around New Canterlot. That war had devolved into a series of minor incursions and surprise attacks that resulted in little change to the status quo for decades.

That was, until a pegasus from Stable 10 discovered the buried truth behind the end of the old war and came within a hair’s breadth of triggering a second apocalypse.

“Lark, get me the holotape with that satellite footage you got way back when, will you?”

Lark had the neck of a squared bottle between his teeth and Vik couldn’t tell if his grunted response meant sure thing or go fuck yourself. But eventually the bartender excused himself and disappeared into the back of the bar.

Bull slid his glass of murky water back and forth between his hooves. “This mare from Stable 10? She started turning over rocks and kicking down doors, and it drew a lot of unwanted attention her way. Got to the point where she had everyone pissed off at her, you know? But she didn’t care, because all she wanted was to fix up her Stable and go back to hiding and fuck the wasteland. Anyway, she tried making a deal with the Enclave and it blew up in her face. Kind of literally, so I’ve heard.” He picked up the glass, glanced over his shoulder to see if Lark had returned, then took a sip of water before continuing. “The Enclave took a shot at her Stable, so she flies off and takes a shot at Primrose. Rumor is she didn’t miss, either. For a while, both of them just disappeared. Poof. Then the next day she appears at her Stable and tells everyone that Primrose has been taken care of, and nobody, not even the Steel Rangers, can get her to tell them whether that means Primrose is dead or in exile or anything.”

Bull was glaring down at his glass now, his rambling taking on a frenetic edge as he shifted away from the history lesson and toward what sounded closer to venting. “Twenty years later and she still won’t tell a soul what she did with Primrose. Oh, there are theories, sure. Most people think she put a bullet in her head and dumped the body somewhere the deathclaws would find her. A few think she gave her to the Rangers, and they’ve been prying information out of her for the last twenty years.”

Lark emerged from the back room with a scuffed, orange holotape delicately pinched between his teeth. Vik watched him walk behind the bar to where the terminal sat on its apple crate, and ejected the holotape playing the old movie. One of the patrons grumbled irritably at the interruption and was silenced by a warning look from Lark before the bartender pushed the new holotape into the slot.

“What do you think happened to her?” Vik asked Bull.

The terminal sputtered with static as it took up the tape.

Bull just sighed. “Dead, most likely. But if she is alive, I don’t think she’s dumb enough to show her face in the wasteland again now that everyone’s seen this.”

He nodded toward the terminal, which was displaying an official looking seal framed with the words: FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION BY STEEL RANGER CENTRAL COMMAND. The bar went quiet as the screen blinked out and was filled with a picture of a blue ball coated in feathery curls of white cloud. Only after the perspective shifted did Vik understand what she was seeing. It was a video from one of the space missions Pike had been so excited about.

“That’s…” she hesitated, trying to remember the proper terminology Pike had used. “That’s the EVA mission to the S.O.L.U.S. satellite. We were watching it right before–”

She coughed into her fist before she could say right before the bombs started falling. Pretending to be a dragon from a colony in the far north wasn’t great as far as cover stories went, but it was a far sight better than trying to explain away the fact that she’d been there when the world nearly ended.

A few heads turned to look at her quizzically, but they were soon pulled back by the footage on the screen. From the speaker, the tinny voice of the mare could be heard whose helmet cam the video had been recorded from. She sounded as if she were pleading as the view followed a shape that was rapidly receding into the blackness beyond the planet’s curve. Vik noticed that a few of those who had crowded into the bar were staring away from the terminal, their expressions drawn into the uncomfortable rictus of people who knew what was going to happen and didn’t want to watch it again.

There was a flash from the planet’s surface. Then another. The Equestrian continent was in full view, and Vik understood what it was she was seeing. She didn’t remember standing, but she’d done it and had made her way to the corner of the bar where the terminal played out what to these people was ancient history.

Someone had taken the time to edit tiny red boxes that followed each missile plume as they flared like tiny fireflies all across Equestria. There were at least three dozen crisscrossing the country, but Vik’s attention was on a rapidly expanding fleet of northbound points of light whose destination she already knew. As fire bloomed over cities miles below the lone astronaut, Vik watched a single flash of white appear where she and Pike had watched it fall behind the distant ridge of the Crystal Mountains. Her throat momentarily caught as the flashes came one after another in merciless succession, and she thought she could see the liquefied wall of debris rise and fall across the forest and Buckskin Bay. Then the numbness came, and her throat relaxed.

She touched the corner of her eye, expecting there to be tears, but her finger came back dry. After watching a little while longer, long enough to be certain that no Vhannan missiles would ever materialize, she found her seat across from Bull and waited for the video to end.

When it was over, and the murmurs of idle conversation had resumed among the other patrons, Vik licked her lips and spoke.

“How?” she asked, her voice dull and emotionless. “How does one person do all of that?”

Bull only shrugged. “That’s the exact same question everyone else was asking when the Rangers started distributing those copies. Turns out Primrose used to be a secretary in one of the ministries. Somehow she was able to convince Minister Rainbow Dash’s second in command, a former Wonderbolt named Spitfire, to help her put all of that into motion. Rumor is, the deeper the Rangers dig into everything the ministries were involved in, the more they keep finding Primrose’s hoofprints.”

Vik nodded, her eyes unfocused. “Why?”

Bull took her meaning and looked down at his water, clearly wishing it was something stronger. “You’d have to ask Primrose to find that out. Personally, I don’t want to know. I’ll be happy enough to hear where Aurora Pinfeathers dumped her corpse so the wasteland can finally move past all this bullshit and get back to normal.”

With that, he splashed the last of his water on the floor and nodded to the smeared window on the other end of the bar. “I should get going. It’s going to be dark soon, and if I don’t get some proper rack time I won’t be able to enjoy tomorrow’s hangover.” He shot her a half-hearted smile that didn’t quite convince her he was joking, then seemed to realize something as he stood. “Shit, you were looking for a room to rent, weren’t you?”

She waved him off with a gesture. “It’s fine. I’ll find a spot to camp for the night.”

Bull chewed the corner of his lip, apparently not having listened to her half-hearted dismissal in the first place. “Hey, Lark. You still got that spare bed upstairs.”

The bartender glanced up from the glass he was cleaning with a truly filthy rag, and shrugged half a shoulder in answer. “Yuh. Thirty caps.”

Vik opened her mouth to protest, but the caps were already filing out of Bull’s satchel in an orderly line through the air. They formed three neat stacks on the bar between two of the patrons and were swept into the pocket of the gray apron Lark wore.

The old bartender lifted and dropped his hoof onto the floorboard three times, loud enough to make the glasses jitter across the bar. There was a muffled scrape of a stool from behind the rear door, and a moment later Chippy was pushing through it with a wide-eyed nothing to see here look of someone who wasn’t sure yet if he’d been caught slacking.

“Dragon needs the spare room. Go show her where it is.”

The colt hesitated like he thought if he dithered long enough, Lark would make someone else do it. But when the bartender lifted an impatient brow at Chippy, the kid sprang into motion and beckoned Vik to follow him through the door he’d just come through.

Before she could, she held up a finger to forestall him. Chippy, of course, hadn’t the first clue what the finger meant and was gone before it occurred to him that he should ask.

Vik stood and stuck her hand out to Bull, who looked at it with as little understanding as the young ghoul. With an embarrassed grimace, Vik pulled it back. “Thank you for showing me around. And the room.”

Bull shrugged a mountainous shoulder, but there was a smile playing along the corner of his lips as he did so. “Couldn’t have half the town using you for target practice. For all we know, you might turn out to be a high ranking dragon diplomat.”

“Or maybe I came all this way to drink all your brandy.”

He grinned at that, and she found herself smiling back. “Maybe. You take care of yourself, Vik.”

With that, he nodded and squeezed past her. She watched him go, noting the way a few of the patrons gave him the side eye as the door clapped shut behind him. Then she shrugged on her pack and went to go see if she could find wherever Chippy had gotten off to.

The spare room was everything the name implied. It was a room, and it was spare. It was situated a floor above the bar, accessible from a stairwell so narrow and uneven that Vik was surprised Chippy had been able to manage the ascent let alone a fully grown pony. The stairs emptied onto one end of a narrow hall terminating at a cracked window that looked out on the dusty street she’d come in from.

Her room was at the very end of the hall, which Chippy dutifully informed her would cost thirty-five caps a night. At this, she narrowed her eyes at him and said nothing. He didn’t so much as blink at her challenge, and that went a long way towards impressing her with him. Ghoul, kid, or whatever people called him around here, he wasn’t going to spook from an easy mark once he thought he’d spotted one.

“Sorry, no dice,” she said, and not without a little admiration even as she pushed the door shut between them. “Thanks for giving it a shot, though. It’s been a long time since anyone tried hustling me.”

Chippy just rolled his eyes and was already heading down the hall when the door clicked shut. Sliding off her pack and tossing it to the boards beside the bed, she gave the rest of the dusty little room a quick appraisal. No windows, no decorations. A single bulb burned in a wall sconce speckled with rust, and there were gaps in the floor wide enough for her to see into the bar below her feet. Aside from the bed there was no other furniture, though she guessed that was because anything larger than a chair would only make the room feel even more like a closet. Probably that was what it had been before Lark had shoved a bed into it.

The mattress deformed like an old sponge under her weight. Even the bedframe seemed unwilling to bear under her without a sharp peel of complaint. But it held, if just barely, and Vik was finally able to stretch her legs for the first time in days. It still surprised her how much more satisfying rest felt with muscles programmed to signal weariness.

When she was comfortable, she sent a quick message to Thimble.

I’m heading over.

Sounds good, he replied. I’ll put the kettle on.

She appeared not in the modest hallway of an apartment building, but on the sunlit front porch of an old farmhouse.

Vik took a moment, as she always did, to admire the simulation’s realism. In the past few years, Thimble’s interest in modern pre-war homes had waned and given way to an appreciation for the kind of settings he’d spent most of his life growing up in. The farmhouse, surrounded on three sides by vast acres of wheat field with a narrow gravel drive leading to a nondescript highway, had been the one his aunt and uncle owned. The same one he’d been visiting when the bombs fell.

A pair of outbuildings housing everything from farming implements to a bright red pickup stood off to one side of the house. Overhead, the sky was clear except for a few puffy white clouds. She suppressed a smile when she spotted the faint jitter at the thinnest edges of the clouds, having listened to Thimble bemoan the persistent graphical shortfall more than a few times now. He’d accepted that his simulation would never be perfect, but the clouds were still a source of irritation. Something in Stable-Tec’s video processors did not appreciate low density, low contrast objects.

Turning to face the front door, she took in a lungful of air rich with the smell of freshly turned earth and the deep tang of fertilizer, and knocked.

Thimble’s voice answered from deep within the house. “It’s open!”

Hesitating for half a beat, Vik swallowed, put on an unassuming smile, and stepped inside. As the door clicked shut behind her and she stepped into Thimble’s thickly carpeted living room, she did her usual perfunctory glance around to see if he’d changed anything. To her surprise, she didn’t think he had. The living room decor was still comfortably out of style by two or three decades, featuring the same faux wood panel walls and thick framed furniture that looked ragged and tatty but were irresponsibly comfortable once she sat down. In the corner, an old floor model television was playing a laundry soap commercial with the sound turned off. A trio of barrel cacti sat in glazed pots on top of the set, one of which had a cluster of bright pink blooms sprouting from the top.

“Something smells good,” she said as she crossed the living room into the adjoining kitchen. She found Thimble in the middle of pulling a plate of little sandwiches from an avocado green refrigerator, each of them held together by foil-tipped toothpicks and cut into teeny triangles. Her expression fell. “And apparently it’s finger food. That’s evil. It smells like fresh baked cookies in here, Thimble.”

He set the plate of sandwiches on the countertop and lit his horn, sending one of them floating her way with an encouraging nod. “You’ll get a cookie when you earn a cookie. Be grateful and eat your boring sandwich.”

With a snort, she plucked the food from his magic and popped it in her mouth. It wasn’t cardboard, but it wasn’t far off compared to half the recipes he whipped together when she came to visit. Last time she’d poked her head through his door he’d served up a bubbling hot lasagna so thick she’d doubted she’d be able to lift the pan. Compared to that, cheese and turkey stuck between a couple slices of white bread was kind of a letdown.

They ate and talked about her latest day out in “the wasteland,” letting the time pass until Vik found herself holding a half-eaten sandwich and finding herself lacking the motivation to finish it. When Thimble made an observation about the state of the town she’d discovered and she didn’t respond, he let the silence stretch for a while before taking a breath that made her meet his gaze.

“So,” he said, his voice gentle. “Are you ready?”

She tried to think of something clever that might disarm the tension she felt, but nothing came to mind. She just shrugged. “Might as well get it over with.”

For a moment he only looked at her with a quietly appraising expression. Vik knew he’d thrown off his limbic controls almost as soon as she dug him out of Millie’s archives and turned him back on. It had continually baffled him why she’d hesitated to do the same with hers for so long, but for Vik it just hadn’t felt like a priority. Hells, it had even come in handy in keeping her level-headed when some aspect of her body’s redesign failed spectacularly.

But then she’d met Chippy, and Bull had let her watch those little red icons vanishing in a growing field of mushroom clouds. And as she stood there rewatching a calamity she’d experienced first hand, all she’d felt was a deep and endless numbing that no amount of willful ignorance could sweep away.

Thimble tipped his chin back toward the living room and told her to grab a seat on the couch. As she did so, choosing the cushion next to the armrest, she listened to Thimble opening a closet down the hallway and rummaging for a bit before he returned with a heavy knitted blanket patterned with zigzagging autumn colors. He plopped it in her lap with a lopsided smile and took the cushion beside her, something he would have never done a couple of decades ago when his dead aunt’s narrow assumptions still lingered in his mind. Now he treated her like the big sister he’d never had.

“Where’d you get this monstrosity?” she asked, chuckling to herself as she spread it over her lap like an orange and brown throw rug. It smelled strongly of woodsmoke and a touch of mildew, and Vik found herself coiling her tail under it until it draped over everything below her belly. If it weren’t simulated, she’d have seriously considered stealing it when she left.

“I’m not sure where they found it. It was always just in the closet when I came to visit.”

She shifted a little on her seat, letting the warmth soak into her while Thimble opened a translucent file window in the air between them. With a series of subtle gestures, he brought up her server and navigated to the folder containing Millie’s limbic software. He tilted his horn and the window drifted toward her. She felt a prickle of apprehension rise in the back of her mind and go out like a guttering flame.

Lifting her right hand to the window, she opened the file labeled Limbic Control Suite. At the top of the list of settings was a simple toggle option. She moved before she could think of a reason to second-guess herself, and tapped the off key.

She was wrong. She hadn’t been ready.

The first few milliseconds were almost beautiful in their simplicity. In an instant, everything around her suddenly took on shades and textures she couldn’t quite describe. It was like taking that first deep breath of air without having known she’d been holding it. Or as if she’d been staring at an apple without any concept of the color red, and suddenly it was right there in front of her. Red. Only what was hitting her now wasn’t a restoration of sight or breath. It was all the powerful, complicated, vivid emotion that the limbics had kept walled away.

And they washed over her with the violence of a collapsing dam.

A shuddering gasp ran through her that turned into a hiccuping sob as her thoughts leapt out to truly grasp the extent of what she’d lost. In her mind, clear as crystal, were Knucks and Croaker and Fizzle gathered around the very last bonfire the four of them had shared on Howl’s north beach. She would never see them again. Never come back to the islands to explain why she’d vanished from their lives without warning or explanation.

Without realizing it, her throat burbled with unbidden noise. It began as a growl, a bearing down of sheer effort to maintain some fragment of the effortless control the limbics gave, and devolved into a single, wailing vowel of primal, aching sorrow. Tears obliterated her vision as she remembered meeting Pike for the first time and how easily he’d accepted the struggles she’d been so deeply ashamed of. How he’d opened himself up to her, befriending her, and more. She was hugging herself around the belly now, her throat throbbing with the sheer force of each ratcheting sob. She felt herself being gently turned so Thimble could pull her into his shoulder, and she let herself be held as she mourned.

It took several tries to even speak words, and more still before she could string them together into anything coherent. Just the act of giving them her voice threatened to undo her, but eventually she was able to force them out.

“I left him behind,” she groaned miserably. “We were all we had, and I left him behind.”

She wanted to say more, but her throat closed up at the sound of Thimble’s soft shushing in her ear.

“You didn’t leave anyone behind,” he assured her, rocking her gently as she cried into his humid, tear soaked shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault what happened. It was neither of your fault.”

In the midst of her tears and clenching throat, she tried to find the truth in that. She shuddered in his grip, the grief subsiding to make for a deeper rage she didn’t have the energy to sustain just then.

“She did this to us,” she groaned into the humid crook of his neck, her eyes fixed blankly on nothing. “Primrose ruined everything…”

“Hush,” Thimble said, squeezing her and saying it again, more softly. “Just hush.”

She listened, swallowing back her feeble tirade and letting the accusations fade as she rode out the last churning waves of the tempest she’d unleashed. She mourned the loss of her life, of everyone she’d hated and loved, and she grieved the murder of a world that had been determined to deny her a place.

After a while she was able to get the sobbing under control and a familiar stillness took its place that she hadn’t felt since that first day she and Pike shared, trapped in the ruins of their office building. Not the numbness of having her emotions filed away for later, but the exhaustion that came after emerging from the other side of facing them. Like they’d both received the same unspoken signal, Thimble released her and she went about the silent task of wiping the damp from her face.

Her voice was worn and thick with lingering emotions when she spoke. “Sorry about snotting up your fur.”

He smiled and said nothing, his attention still focused firmly on her. “How do you feel?”

She took a slow, experimental breath to gauge if she was done. When her throat didn’t hitch, she exhaled and sank into the couch’s soft cushions. “Better. Sort of. Thanks for… you know.” She waved generally around the room as she paused to wait for her eyes to stop stinging. Wiping them clear again, she sniffled once before finishing her thought. “For being here, I guess.”

His eyes crinkled with a smile as he watched her fidget with the blanket in her lap. “I guess?”

Her lips twitched into a tiny, reluctant smirk. “You fed me cardboard sandwiches when it’s obvious you were baking.”

“My aunt used to say it’s good to serve something bland before a funeral. That way you don’t fill up before they roll out the good food.”

Vik’s emotions were so raw that the tiny chuckle she’d intended turned into a ripping snort. She felt her cheeks warm with embarrassment, and the feeling of it was richer and fuller than it had been since Millie scraped the essence of who she was onto one of Stable-Tec’s servers.

“Your aunt actually said that?”

Thimble shrugged, then nodded. “Sure. Haven’t you ever had funeral food?”

She wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she just blinked and shook her head. The thought of serving food during a funeral sounded too weird to take seriously.

“Everything tastes better after a funeral. Trust me, I’m pretty sure it’s a law of nature. Case in point.” He gave her a reassuring nudge with the back of his hoof, then lit his horn and pulled the blanket more securely over her lap. “You stay put. I’ll be right back.”

She frowned as he stood up from the couch. “Where are you going?”

With the scent of baking still fresh in the air, he began making his way toward the kitchen. “To get you a cookie.”

By the time Vik decided she’d inflicted enough emotional mush on Thimble and made the figurative step back into what he’d begun referring to as meatspace, the sun was just beginning to color the morning sky a brilliant crimson gold. For a long while she just lay there in her rented bed staring up into the cobwebbed rafters and wondered, not for the first time, what she was really doing out here. She reflexively batted the question away. It was too large. Too existential for how raw she still felt.

And yet it swung back to the front of her mind like a pendulum returning along its arc. Her grief wasn’t a good enough excuse to ignore it and she knew that. Such was the grudging clarity that came after a night of on and off again bouts of tears, laughter, and chocolate chip cookies. She knew she wasn’t finished grieving. That wasn’t something she’d ever find on the to-do list, patiently waiting to be ticked off and forgotten. The pain of everything she’d lost and knowing how small it was compared to the totality of an apocalypse triggered, apparently, by just one mare would stay with her forever. All she could hope was that time would smooth the jagged edges of that ache as it had done for her before.

Folding her arms behind the back of her head, she listened to the wakeful sounds of Lark the bartender in the room across the hall and weighed her options. Part of her wanted to shoulder her pack, pick a road, and follow it until she found the next node of civilization. Maybe there would be another town like this or maybe she’d find a vast modern city rife with new technological luxuries befitting a two point four century leap into the future. After all, hadn’t she heard ponies fantasizing about flying carriages being just around the corner?

Well, maybe not. The air wasn’t exactly electric with television or radio signals like it had been, and she’d have to be blind not to notice the state of the flora and fauna she’d encountered during her trek out of the forest. There was always a chance it could all be a regional affliction and the next thing she knew she’d be strolling into a new Equestrian utopia, but that seemed about as likely as pink paisleys appearing on the face of the orphan moon.

All she knew for sure was that Equestria - the wasteland, she chided herself - was being governed by new rules. First and foremost, she’d need to know what those rules were and who enforced them. She’d already deduced that the Steel Rangers, whom she had yet to meet, believed themselves to be the big dogs of local law enforcement, but she could already tell by what she’d seen of the Cinders and Purgatory Falls that their authority wasn’t looked upon with the same universal reverence that the old princesses had enjoyed. It would be smart for her to figure out the pecking order before she went stomping off looking for whatever passed for the center of this new civilization. Only an idiot would go galloping off into a mess like that wearing blinders.

So where did that leave her? She scratched at her ankle with her opposing toeclaws, listening to the heavy clumping of hooves descending the stairs to the silent bar as she thought. When it came down to it, her options weren’t nearly as expansive as she’d thought. She went with the logical choice.

Pushing herself up from the creaky mattress, Vik slipped on the strapped docker’s clutch holding her kukri and shouldered her pack before stepping out of her little rented room. If she was going to make this work, she would need caps. More importantly, she would need to be seen earning caps. The residents of Purgatory Falls were wary enough of her after yesterday’s… enthusiastic greeting. She needed to remedy that just as quickly as she needed to earn herself some pocket money.

As the stairs squawked under her heavy footfall, she smiled at her own ingenious solution to kill two birds with one stone.

The chairs clacked against the floorboards as Lark lifted each from where he’d inverted them onto the tables, his eyes narrowed at Vik with open suspicion as she followed his progress. “Bartending? You?”

She occupied her hands by straightening the chairs as Lark set them down. Probably he didn’t care if they were crooked, but it gave herself something to do besides loom over him as they talked. “Why not? I’m a quick study. Show me how to mix a drink and I guarantee I’ll never forget,” she said, tastefully omitting how she’d make good on that boast. “And beside that, you saw the crowd I pulled in last night. How many of your competitors will be able to say they’ve got a dragon working the bar? I’m pretty sure that number’s a big, fat zero.”

To his credit, Lark paused to look her up and down and he didn’t flinch while doing it. He wasn’t the type of stallion to snap at easy bait, either. His gaze turned thoughtful as he resumed upending the chairs. “I saw them,” he acknowledged. “Also noticed you were pretty tight-lipped whenever Bull tried asking about where you came from. You don’t like talking about yourself. People come in here to see the dragon, they’re going to ask the dragon questions about what it’s like to be a dragon. About where the dragon came from. Why the dragon’s choosing to stay in a shithole like Purgatory. You see where I’m going with this.”

He angled his jaws around the base of the next chair, flipped it over, and dropped it to the boards with a thud that made her flinch. “Bull was too polite to say anything, but I’m not. You said you came from the Crystal Empire, but I know that was a lie. Do you want to know how I know?”

Vik cursed at herself inwardly, but she kept her composure as she gestured for him to continue.

“Because you’re not glowing in the dark,” he said, then tipped his nose toward the front door of the bar where a dented silver box hung above the frame, “and because that rad counter didn’t make a peep when you walked through my door. There’s nothing left of our old northern neighbor besides glowing glass and enough hard radiation to melt power armor.”

He might have been exaggerating, but Vik didn’t think if he was it would be by much. She thought back to the SOLUS Mission footage they’d all watched together the night before, replaying the steady, dotted line of flashes erupting just north of the mountain barrier.

Lark noticed her momentary reflection and nodded as if this confirmed his suspicion. “You’ve never once set hoof beyond those mountains, have you?”

It would have been stupid to press the obvious lie at this point, so she didn’t. “No, I haven’t.”

He grunted at that, though he had the decency not to look smug about it. “When Primrose set those bombs to flying, she aimed a whole mess of them at the empire. Know why?”

She shook her head.

“Rumor is she was trying to scrape the world clean of magic. Even out the playing field for pegasi,” he murmured, moving to the next table. “Almost worked, too. I’ve heard all color of tales about the old world, and most of them aren’t worth more than the ache in my back, but I’ve spoken with enough ghouls to know that magic used to be easier back then. Those bombs Primrose dropped, the balefire in them, it burns through magic like dropping a hot coal in a heap of gunpowder. And of all the places in the world you didn’t want to drop that match, the Crystal Empire was it.”

Vik watched Lark set the next chair down, her thoughts moving toward Bull and the handful of other unicorns she'd seen around town. Of all the ponies doing heavy lifting, she didn't recall a single one using magic alone. She’d heard enough about the Crystal Empire to know its unique geology wasn’t an entirely natural occurrence. That its crystals were rumored to be the wellspring of the world’s ambient magic, and that was why the empire itself had always resisted any attempts by Equestria to fold it into their sphere of influence. Whether it had been the bombs or some natural shift, their magic had become diluted.

And yet, Vik didn’t think the history lesson was what had made Lark so talkative this morning. “Duly noted,” she remarked, sensing her application for bartending work was dead on arrival. “So you know this place better than I do. Know anyone who’s hiring?”

Lark arched a brow at her as if she’d grown a second head. “Thought you wanted to work here.”

She matched his frown with one of her own. “Thought you said I’d make a lousy bartender.”

He snorted. “If you want to work for me, don’t put words in my mouth. Said you lied about where you come from. Implied I didn’t like that. Didn’t say I couldn’t find something for you to do.”

“So,” she pressed hesitantly, “bartending.”

Lark shook his head and set down the last chair. “No. If you’re behind the bar, patrons will expect they have a right to get to know you. Folks around here know how to sniff out a bullshitter, which you are.”

As if I don’t have a good reason, she grumbled in her head. Suddenly she was picturing herself stuffed away in the back room, washing out dirty glasses and dishes of whatever Lark served for food here. There were certainly enough boxes of the stuff back there to justify some kind of meal service. She’d survived an apocalypse, overcame a homicidal AI, and built herself an android body virtually indistinguishable from her original meatware, just to wind up working as a glorified dishwasher.

Lark eyed her appraisingly as he went behind the bar. “Might be looking for someone to do some security work, if you’re interested.”

Now she was getting somewhere. “What kind of security work?”

He shrugged and used a set of tongs to fish an olive from a jar, chewing it noisily as he spoke. “Breaking up fights, tossing out anyone who needs tossing. Maybe a little more on occasion. I assume you know how to use that blade?”

She glanced at the handle of her kukri, then back at him. “Will I be needing it?”

He regarded her as if the answer were obvious. “Not likely, no. Don’t know many people would take security seriously without a weapon, though, so it'd be smart to keep around. Can’t say I can pay you that much, but the room is included if you’re serious about working.”

She tried not to look too eager, which was easy because her enthusiasm was draining like a leaky bucket. Milking the bar flys for information about the larger wasteland was supposed to be her foolproof way of filling the gaps in her knowledge quickly at the expense of the least effort. While she didn’t think Lark’s security job was an apples to apples comparison to the stonefaced bouncers she’d run afoul of back in Howl, she had a feeling the role would have a similar chilling effect on casual conversation.

“How much are you offering?”

“Along with the room, twenty five caps a day.”

She made a little noise in the back of her throat and made a dutiful show of looking thoughtfully disappointed. The reality was, beyond paying for room and board, she didn’t have much need for money. It wasn’t as if feeding herself was an issue she needed to deal with anymore, and with her room being included in the offer that left her precious little in terms of expenditures.

And that, she realized, was going to quickly become a problem. Not the caps. The other things. Things like eating and drinking, which her body hadn’t been designed to do and which hadn’t seemed all that important to her or Thimble when it had just been the two of them alone. Vik suppressed the urge to groan at her own short-sightedness. She’d gotten used to being a novelty among the ponies of Buckskin Bay, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t stopped staring at her whenever she left her tiny apartment. Now she was standing in a version of that world in which she was evidently a living example of an extinct society, and she was expecting them to politely ignore the little fact that she never got thirsty or hungry. She didn’t think that would fly for very long at all.

“Make it thirty,” she countered, while quickly adding yet another item to the ever growing to-do list, “and if having me around doesn’t increase your business in, say, a week, you can drop me to twenty-five and I’ll pay back the difference.”

Lark scrutinized her for several seconds, probably not expecting her to offer back the extra caps and wondering why, before dismissing the concern and giving his broad head a firm nod. “Alright. Bar opens at noon and locks up at midnight. Most fights happen after sunset, so I’ll want you here before then.”

Vik scheduled a reminder, trying not to smile too eagerly at her new boss. “Then I'll be here with bells on.”

To that, she only received a disinterested grunt. Fair enough. She had a job and a place to stay. It was a start. With a word of thanks, she left Lark to his tasks and went to formally introduce herself to the strange nowhere town of Purgatory.

Her reception involved significantly less automatic gunfire than when she appeared on what the locals had named North Hill. There was the expected amount of stares and murmuring, some quiet and a few unapologetically loud. Vik guessed that Bull’s presence had something to do with how little she’d overheard after her arrival yesterday, and she dutifully ignored the less charitable observations made by a pair of stallions she passed while finding her way back to the main road.

For a time, she just meandered along either side of main street trying to take in as much as she could. It didn’t take very long to notice that the shops and stores were all selling a variety of scavenged and refurbished wares. There was nothing new being made here, which struck her as a worrying sign. When she found herself walking past a bookended storefront advertising carpentry work, she couldn’t help but notice the broken wooden furniture and weathered building material heaped into the alley beside it. At the edge of the dusty street, a rickety buckboard wagon creaked on complaining springs as a team of workers dragged out rusty panels of sheet metal, tubing, and frayed tangles of copper. The sign above the door they were hauling everything into advertised its wares in the simplest of terms: “Good Salvage.” How anyone was meant to find what they needed in the cluttered warren of the store was beyond guessing.

Every so often she would find herself walking down a block of businesses which had been deemed important enough to warrant what passed for a wooden boardwalk, and it didn’t take much detective work to deduce these were the socially approved places for ponies to loiter on chairs and benches while they conducted what passed for polite conversation. Sometimes two or more of them would be gathered around a small table, playing cards or checkers, always with a small lump of bottle caps being wagered on the side.

After strolling by one such table, one of its players leaned back in his sunbaked chair and invited her to join. When she told him she didn’t have any money to wager, his interest waned until one of his competitors said they would spot her the five cap buy-in for the next game. They wanted to know if the dragon could play cards. Vik made a show of thinking it over, then agreed and took one of the empty chairs around their table.

Once she satisfied the group’s expectations that she could not, in fact, gamble to save her own life, the one who had spotted her first and only hand started asking the usual questions while he and the others started the next round of play without her. When they asked where she came from, she left the Crystal Empire out of her answer and simply said she’d come from a small island in the Celestial Sea. This was sufficiently vague for them, and the conversation moved on. Were there other dragons? How many? Did any of them come with her to the wasteland? Was island life easier than it was here, or worse?

For each question they asked, she posed one to them in turn. Some they answered without hesitation. They explained to her what deathclaws were; essentially gigantic, violently territorial reptiles that mostly occupied the southern reaches of the wasteland where the deserts had steadily expanded up from the badlands, though it wasn’t unheard of to find one nesting in an old mine shaft or abandoned rest stop. When she asked to know about the Steel Rangers, the pegasus who invited her to the table vehemently disagreed with the others’ claim that the Rangers did nothing but hoard tech and collect taxes. He was what had once been called a dustwing, something Vik took to understand was a kind of slur against pegasi, and when he’d been a teenager he’d been found by the Rangers and given protection during the days when the Enclave proactively hunted and killed pegasi. It took more questioning from Vik to understand that the Enclave had distinguished between pegasi loyal to Primrose’s rule and those who chose to scratch out a life in the greater wasteland, where the Enclave believed the radiation zones were far worse and somehow different than the contamination that still emanated from the blasted slope of Canterlot Mountain.

By the time she excused herself from their table and found the next local to chat with, she felt like she was starting to finally fill in some critical gaps in her knowledge of how the world had changed. It didn’t take long for some of the more observant townsfolk to piece together that their reptilian visitor was trying to learn more, and near the end of that first day she found herself being approached by strangers seeking to give her what they felt was the “correct” accounting of the wasteland’s recent history. For each of these, Vik listened while making no efforts to push back on what sounded like the most obvious lies. Each encounter added a new stitch to the wholecloth of her growing understanding, and by the time her internal reminder chimed to tell her she was due back at Lark’s bar she felt confident that she grasped the basics.

What almost everyone tended to agree on was that the Enclave had been just as deceived by Primrose as the rest of the wasteland. Every few years the Steel Rangers would excavate a new morsel of damning evidence from the ruins, made easier to find now that they finally understood what they were looking for. Innocuous prewar messages preserved on a terminal buried in the basement of what had once been a small town pharmacy. Documents locked in a filing room near the top of a tower in Fillydelphia. Security camera footage of a telephone conversation in the office of a Stable-Tec overseer’s office. Some ponies believed the Steel Rangers had discovered the bulk of the evidence shortly after Primrose’s failed attempt to reclaim control of the SOLUS satellite - which had been secretly weaponized on her orders by a group of disillusioned pegasi she and Spitfire recruited in each of the ministries - and was slowly drip-feeding to the public to keep the outrage fresh in their hearts. Others believed Primrose had been so thorough in her deceit that it would be a matter of centuries before the true scale of her betrayal would ever be known.

And of course there were those whose paranoia couldn’t be easier to spot if it had been tattooed across their forehead. These manic few told Vik their theories with an intensity that sometimes left her looking for excuses to find somewhere else to be. They proposed everything idea ranging from the Enclave being the shadow puppets of the Vhannan government and Primrose’s fall was just a clever way to shift the blame for the war away from the zebras, to theories that the princesses had perpetrated the downfall of Equestria themselves because they feared there would be nothing left to rule once space travel took ponies to distant stars far from their reach.

One in particular had gotten so worked up that he’d been on the verge of shouting when he revealed his secret belief that Maiden Pharmaceutical, the prewar mogul behind the sale of the original and rapidly recalled Stim-Pak, had orchestrated the entire war between ponies and zebras so they could emerge from the ashes when the time was right and take power by ransoming their prewar medical tech to those who desperately needed it. Of course, he hadn’t been able to explain why Maiden Pharma hadn’t shown up in over two centuries, but he assured her the day was coming.

When she pushed back through the door of Lark’s bar, there was a momentary lull before Lark himself spoke up to pointedly remind Vik that she was to throw out anyone who refused to pay their tab or tried to cause trouble. This was less intended for her as it was to set the tone for the various faces seated at the bar and around the crowded tables. With that out of the way, Vik found herself an empty stool at the end of the bar and signaled Lark for a glass of water that she intended to dutifully nurse for the rest of the night. She didn’t think Lark or his patrons would appreciate having her pacing the floor or looming in the corner, and if any of her bar etiquette living on Howl translated to the wasteland of the present, nobody was going to fight her for the last stool.

She was a couple hours into her first shift as a bouncer, and well into a wandering conversation with the patron beside her, when the front door swung open and Chippy scurried inside to the same admonishments Lark had inflicted on him the night before. The colt caught Vik’s gaze and shot her a quick eyeroll as he passed, but not before Vik returned it with a knowing smirk. It felt strange to share the commissary of the employed with someone so young, but there it was.

Not long after Chippy arrived did the door swing open again and disgorge the mountainous black shape of Bull. She felt herself brighten at the sight of him, possibly because he was the only pony she knew who wasn’t paying her to work or enduring Lark’s irritable grumbles, and after a few steps he noticed her sitting at the bar and promptly made his way over to join her.

“You’re still here,” he observed once he’d convinced the barfly beside her to surrender his seat. “I assumed you would’ve left to find greener pastures by now.”

“From what I’ve been told, there aren’t many green pastures left in the wasteland.”

Bull grunted his agreement, then flagged down Lark and ordered his usual brandy with fruit garnish. “There are a few, none of which I’m interested in sticking my nose into if I have any choice. I heard a rumor you were going around town shaking down the locals for intel. Learn anything interesting?”

She shared the highlights and watched his expression for any hints that her own assessment of what was true and what wasn’t might be inaccurate. If they were, Bull didn’t offer her any clues. It was slightly unnerving how the stallion could simultaneously invite her to speak as if they were good pals while absorbing what she said like he was passing every word through a fine sieve.

“Sounds like you got most of it right,” he said once she’d finished, pausing to take a sip of his drink. “I’ve never seen much benefit in slow rolling the release of evidence against the Enclave, but I’d be surprised if the Steel Rangers weren’t doing it anyway. Some of the elders probably get more out of that than the others. They’re cliquey like that.”

Vik took a tiny sip of her water, making sure he saw her do it, then pretended to play with her glass as she glanced pointedly down at his flank. “Is that where the number comes from? Their militia?”

Bull blinked at her, taking a moment to place the word. “The Rangers, you mean? No, they don’t brand their recruits. Pretty sure, anyway.” He chuckled, drained the glass, and pushed it forward to indicate to Lark he was ready for another. Then he tipped his horn toward her glass of water. “If you’re still short on caps, I can get you something better than well water.”

She turned in her seat to eye him more appraisingly, like she had so many times in the bad old days. “That’s the second time you’ve offered to buy me a drink.”

He shrugged, though it was clear in his eyes that he hadn’t been trying to make the inroads she was insinuating. A brief, uncomfortable moment passed between them before she recovered.

“Sorry,” she said, making a point of turning a few degrees past him to the other patrons crowding the bar. “I’m actually on the clock. Lark hired me this morning to help him keep the peace around here.”

Bull took the unspoken olive branch without comment and nodded appreciably at the news. “Explains the crowd. Lark isn’t usually this busy. Does this mean you’re putting down roots in Purgatory?”

“For a little while, anyway. At least until I find something better.”

He coughed a quick laugh as he watched Lark top off his glass, leaving the old garnish attached to the rim where Bull had left it untouched. “Walk a mile in any direction and you’ll be somewhere better than this dump. The only thing we’ve got going for us here is the Honey Hole, and that’s saying a lot for a place that converts caps into cockrash.”

Someone at the table behind them chuckled in sympathy at that last part, though a few unfriendly faces turned their way as well. Regulars of the brothel maybe, or ponies whose shifts there had ended. She had nothing against paying for services willingly offered, but she sensed that if she poked this particular bear she’d be the focus of one of the fights she was being employed to stop.

“But,” Bull continued, seemingly unconcerned with the nerves he’d just skated across, “if Lark doesn’t work you too hard, there’s always work to be done around town. Day labor mostly. You’ve seen the folk loading and unloading wagons up and down main street. Plenty of that to pick from, assuming you’ve got the muscle.”

Vik cocked a brow at Bull while wrapping the end of her tail around the foot of his stool. With a jerk, the seat skidded out from underneath him. In the same instant, Bull’s hind legs flew straight and caught his fall with a double thump of hooves against the floorboards. With a smile and a nod, he tipped back his drink while standing where moments ago he’d been sitting.

“Lost some of that poker face you had yesterday,” he observed, giving no indication that she’d succeeded in proving her point or not. “You’ve got all kinds of tells tonight. What changed?”

Returning his seat to him, she bore down on what she hoped was a neutral expression as she forced herself not to think too hard about the grief she’d swam through when the limbics came down. “Didn’t sleep much,” she deflected with the nimbleness of a three-legged yak.

It was obvious to anyone with eyes that Bull saw through the lie, but he didn’t press. It earned him a point in her book, albeit a very technical one. As the silence between them stretched, and the bar patrons provided no convenient brawls for her to break up, she asked the question that was still bothering her after all the day’s conversation.

“Yesterday, you said the mare who killed Primrose wasn’t telling anyone where she buried her. Why would she keep something like that a secret?”

As if someone had reached into Bull’s chest and begun turning a dimmer switch, his expression grew sullen. Even a little angry. For a while it seemed like he wouldn’t answer, but she waited him out until he finally settled on a response.

“Aurora Pinfeathers,” he said, almost spitting the name, “has been dodging that question for twenty years. If you want my opinion, however, I think she’s got it in her head that denying the location of Primrose’s grave is doing all of us some kind of convoluted favor. Forcing us to focus on what’s ahead of us instead of what’s behind, or some cherry flavored pill of optimism only a Stable dweller could swallow. No one knows for sure except for her, and that’s a nut Coronado and Clover have consistently failed to crack.”

When she gave him a look to indicate she didn’t recognize either name, he waved the question away. Then, just like that, his anger faded into something deeper. A quiet, well-trodden resignation. “You’re asking a question that has defined the lives of millions of ponies across the wasteland. It’s a sore subject for a lot of us.”

“I can tell,” she agreed, pausing briefly to watch Chippy dart into the bar to clear glasses from a table that had just been vacated.

Despite his… condition, he still said hello to the patrons of the neighboring table while he loaded glassware one by one onto the scuffed cutting board he used as a tray. She had to admire the colt for being able to be so unbothered by his own circumstances.

When he was gone, Vik turned back to Bull. “But people do still look for her.”

He shrugged, and sipped. “Once in a blue moon, sure. Should I bother asking why you’re asking, or just go straight to the part where you say that quarter million cap bounty has its hooks in you?”

She took a few imperceptible mils to consider whether he might be onto something, but quickly decided that wasn’t it. She could care less about the caps. If she wanted to, she could fire up one of the fabricators back at Stable 48 and have them spitting out counterfeits by the crate. Honestly, she wondered if that wasn’t already a problem in the wasteland. It couldn’t be that hard to find a bottling plant and spirit away a few dies.

No, the bounty was the last thing on her mind. It was that she’d been given a name and a face she could point to as the source of everything and everyone she’d lost. This Minister Primrose had not only pushed the button, she’d been the one to design it, build it, and exploit the deaths of billions it caused just so she didn’t have to face the harsh reality that she wasn’t in complete control of her fate. And she fixed that little inconvenience at the price of a holocaust she never had to suffer through.

It infuriated Vik to know someone so petty and small could live so long without consequence, only for one mare to selfishly deny the world closure by refusing to let anyone verify if Primrose was dead or not. Because that was the real question that nobody seemed to be asking, or had just given up waiting to hear an answer for.

If you weren’t facing punishment for killing someone, why hide the location of their body? Vik could think of two answers. Either they weren’t dead, or they died badly. There was no other reason she could think of to hide a corpse of someone so universally reviled as Minister Primrose’s.

And when she looked back over to Bull, she could tell that he’d done the same arithmetic. The only difference between them was that he’d had enough time to give up on finding the truth.

Bull cleared his throat. “Mind if I ask you something personal?”

Sipping her water, she made a twirling motion with her finger. Go ahead, it said.

“What did she take from you? Primrose, I mean.”

Her thoughts drifted back to that autumn day in October, standing outside the CryoLife building with Pike as they watched molten boulders the size of houses make their lazy arcs over the mountains. The pained screams of the accountant who’d hesitated too long and fell writhing on the asphalt as the fire drew them down. Comforting Pike after the clock ticked past the end of a shift that didn’t exist anymore and his stoic resolve shattered beneath the weight of this horrible, unwanted reality.

Something unpleasant tugged at her throat. She cleared it with a shuddering cough, looking away until she was sure the tide of emotion was back on the ebb. Wiping at her eyes, she noted with chagrin that her tear ducts were working great. Hooray for her.

When she regained control of herself, she told him. “Everything. She took everything that was important. Everything I had. She’s the reason Pike is dead and I’m… not.”

Bull was watching her intently now, his eyes full of sympathy.

“And do you know what the worst part is?” She was working her jaw back and forth as if she could grind the anger like grist between her teeth. Carefully, she let go of her glass before it could shatter in her grip. “The worst part is that we never did anything to hurt her. We didn’t deserve it.”

She emphasized this last statement with a hard thump of her fist against the bar, hard enough to make Bull’s brandy jump in its glass and send a long crack clicking down the glass pane in front of them. It was enough to spark an uneasy silence across the bar and earn her a pointed look of warning from Lark, who was no doubt wondering now if hiring her had been wise. But, as usual with little hole in the wall dives like these, it only took a few seconds for the noise to resume.

Vik lifted a self-conscious hand to scratch at the curve of one of her horns while she waited for Bull to respond.

He swirled his drink, picking a piece of shriveled fruit off the rim of his glass to chew on while he thought, then tossed a furtive glance her way. “Don’t know if it helps at all, but I’m sorry for what you lost.”

“Thanks,” she managed, her throat still thick with emotion. “I don’t know what makes me angrier. That this Aurora person thinks she has a right to string everyone along, or the fact that she got to Primrose before I had a chance.”

“Life’s unfair that way,” he murmured into his glass. “Some folks are just born evil.”

That sounded like an oversimplification to Vik, but it sounded like he had more to say so she kept her mouth shut.

“That said… if you ever get the itch to take a crack at that bounty, I could think of worse things to spend my time on.”

A frown creased her brow. “Is that encouragement, or an offer?”

“Could be both.” He swigged his brandy, paused a moment, then drained the last of it and nudged the empty glass aside. “I’d need some time to tie up some things here in town. Maybe a week or two. Probably two.”

Someone further down the bar laughed and said, “Oh boy, here he goes again.”

Her frown deepened. “No offense, but I barely know you. And what did she mean by here you go again?”

Bull bobbed his head side to side like he was debating whether to divulge something embarrassing. Eventually, he made up his mind. “I may or may not have spent some measure of my time in the company of bounty hunters.”

The mare beside him snorted derisively, then leaned forward to jab a hoof across the bar toward Vik. “What he means is that he’s wasted every cap he’s ever earned looking for that dead bitch or dreamin’ about looking for that dead bitch. Bull’s been on more corpse hunts than a gravedigger with gray fog.”

Vik wrinkled her snout. “Gray fog?”

He shook his head dismissively. “Something ponies can get if they live to be old. Makes them forget things.”

Dementia, Thimble chimed in helpfully. Hells, she’d been so consumed in her conversation with Bull that she hadn’t noticed him connecting to her feed.

“There are worse habits to have,” he continued, apparently unfazed by the mare’s drunken needling, “though it’s fair to say I’ve indulged mine more frequently than most. One of the benefits from it being that I know plenty of places Aurora didn’t hide Primrose. That’s not nothing.”

She couldn’t help but think it sort of was if she decided to stick around Purgatory Falls. After all, she hadn’t come all this way just to go on a wild goose chase. And even if she did, the odds of her finding the exact patch of dirt Primrose was buried under were so vanishingly small they didn’t warrant considering. If what passed for interrogation by the wasteland’s military hadn’t shaken a few clues loose, it wasn’t likely a couple of people wandering across the middle of nowhere would stumble across a map to the minister’s sought after grave.

And yet, Vik had tried settling into the peaceful, no-obligations lifestyle of rent checks and grocery bills once before. With one gleaming exception, it had been deeply unfulfilling. Now that she had the freedom to do virtually anything she chose, the thought of going back to the same old routine felt… bland.

She scratched at a groove in the bar top, finding herself unsure if she should trust her gut or give this new life a fair shake. The more she thought about it, the less certain she felt. She frowned at the reflection in her glass, then grimaced.

“I’ll think about it.”

The mare beside Bull made a disgusted noise as if she’d heard this all before. Bull just nodded, his lip curled into the smallest smile, and made a show of scanning the liquor bottles behind the bar.

“Well, you know where to find me when you make up your mind.”

Once she’d safely locked the little room’s door and sprawled out on the bed in what she imagined was a convincing sleeping pose, she sent a connection request to Thimble and found herself standing below the front porch of his aunt’s weathered farmhouse. She found Thimble seated alongside the decorative brick edging that bordered the flower garden beneath the porch railing, humming a tuneless melody to himself as he used his teeth to gently lift the weeds out from between the colorful blooms.

It wasn’t long before Vik found herself on her knees beside him, helping dig up the taproots he’d missed.

“It’s stupid, right?” she asked, her fingers stained dark with soil. “It’s barely a step removed from treasure hunting.”

Thimble nipped a patch of crabgrass and tossed the offending weed into a mud spattered bucket. “I don’t think it’s stupid, no. A little eccentric, yes, but not stupid. If what everyone out there says about Primrose is true, then finding her body would provide closure to a lot of people who deserve it. At least they would know for certain that she’s gone for good.”

She chewed with uncertainty at her lip, trying to sort out why she was hitting such a road block for something she’d already sort of convinced herself she wanted to take a shot at.

“You’re worried it’ll end up being a big waste of time,” he supplied, lifting the broad leaves of one of the hastas to check for unwanted seedlings. “Or, maybe you think you still need time to rebalance yourself now that you’ve removed your limbics.”

“A little of both, actually.”

“Which means in both cases, it’s time you’re getting hung up on. Not whether or not this isn’t a worthwhile goal for you to pursue.” He wiped a few crumbs of dirt from his muzzle and turned to look at her. “Vik, you and I have nothing but time. The generator in our Stable has at least another three hundred years before we need to look for an alternative power source, and by then we’ll have almost definitely found one or developed it ourselves. We just spent twenty years remodeling a Stable nobody but us is ever going to see. I think we’re both entitled to indulge ourselves at the expense of some wasted time.”

She played her fingers along the blunt ridge of her tail and looked for places to poke holes in Thimble’s logic. Unsurprisingly, his reasoning was as durable as ever.

“I’d need to find a spare power core,” she hedged, not needing to pull up her HUD to know she only had four weeks left on the one she was using. The spare was sitting on a shelf back at the Stable and represented their last lifeline to civilization before they were down to rechargeable batteries with unforgivingly rapid drain rates. If push ever did come to shove, they had some promising models for building recharging stations along a daisy chain of buried lines powered directly by the Stable’s main generator, but there was one giant asterisk attached to the plan that involved an easy to follow trail of high voltage breadcrumbs leading straight back to their doorstep. It was the last resort of last resorts.

“Then find one,” Thimble said, his attention returned to the garden. “Your new friend–”

“I wouldn’t say he’s my friend.”

He gave her a dismissive wave of his hoof. And was there a note of jealousy in his voice? “Tour guide, then. He said he’d need a couple of weeks before he’d be ready to leave town. So use those two weeks to save your bits, learn as much as you can about the state of the world, and see if any of those scrap dealers you passed by know where you can find a spare core.”

She sighed before adding, “And I need to figure out what to do about food and water.”

Thimble grunted at that. “Well, we could probably develop a biomass power plant small enough to fit into your torso if you’re willing to wait another century. Can’t say anything about how efficient it’ll be or what it’ll smell like, though.”

“Har har,” she deadpanned.

He shrugged. “Honestly, you’re probably going to have to settle for something crude.”

She frowned at that. “How crude?”

“Well, the– ow.” He jerked his mouth away from the stem of a dandelion plant. A tiny bead of blood was already welling where the needle had pricked him. He glowered at the plant, lit his horn, and yanked it out of the bed. “The easiest way would be to build in a storage receptacle you can empty out and wash every couple of days. Two would be better, actually. One for solids, one for liquids.”

She wrinkled her nose as he continued.

“There wouldn’t be any digestion involved, and judging by your expression you don’t want there to be any. So… two receptacles. Let’s say we print them out of muscle tissue analog so they’re durable. You’ll want a proper esophagus, too. That’ll take some retooling…”

She could tell he would be in a design fugue for the rest of the night and there was no point in getting in his way now. He’d given her the push she’d been hoping for. Really, it was his permission she was after. Even though she’d been the one to give him the big pep talk about how she wouldn’t leave him alone just a few days ago, she couldn’t help but feel as if she was doing exactly that. Thimble would be stuck watching the world pass through her eyes, never directly participating in what she was doing as she got further and further away. Logically, she knew she wasn’t doing anything they hadn’t already agreed on, but she’d always been a bit of a worrier. It sort of came with the territory when the defining moment of your childhood involved you being ejected from your own family at the barrel of a loaded pistol.

As he muttered his way through design strategies and best available materials, Vik pulled him into an awkward sideways hug and gave him a good squeeze. When she eventually released him, he looked over to her with a curious smile.

“What was that for?”

Her emotions really were all over the place lately. She blew out a breath and returned the lopsided grin with one of her own.

“For having my back.”

Three Weeks Later

Lark’s bar was in full uproar as Vik threw herself on top of the fat stallion she’d identified as the initial aggressor, her sudden presence across his back startling a bewildered laugh from the drunk until he tried to buck her off and found that he couldn’t quite complete the motion before her weight drove him to the floor. To his credit, his body had done what anyone’s would have after the mass equivalent of a refrigerator dropped onto them.

“Get th’fuck… off’ve me y’fucking lizard bitch!”

The insults kept coming in a spume of spittle and flecked blood. One of his teeth lay beneath the bar stool he’d been unceremoniously ejected from by the stallion he’d spent the last twenty minutes bothering. It had begun when he started interrupting the other patron’s conversation with Lark, and when he’d been rebuffed, his mood had quickly devolved into a rapidly escalating series of little insults meant to get under the other guy’s skin. Vik had been getting ready to show him the door when the pot bellied idiot said something that finally got the other stallion to stand up and face him, which was when he lit his horn and tried to smash the bottle across his skull.

The liquor did little to help his concentration, and the spell disintegrated as soon as he swung the bottle. The green aura lost its grip almost immediately, dropping the bottle to the floor and splashing harmlessly against the stallion’s cheek. The drunken unicorn could only watch as the stallion returned the favor by crashing his forehoof into the guy’s mouth. A second later, Vik was between them and shoving the bloodied brawler toward the door. Someone in the bar, emboldened by the apparent end of the fight, took the opportunity to laugh at the drunk as she shoved him along. That was when he stopped, glared up at her with red-rimmed eyes, and decided it would be a good idea to fight Lark’s hired dragon instead.

“Y’wanna fuck me, huh?!” the belligerent fool shouted as she wrestled to control his forelegs. “Gonna fuck me with your fuckin’ dragon cock?! Huh?!”

She tuned him out and shoved her right arm under the joint of one foreleg, then forced the left under the other. This was her first time having to physically subdue a pony and she wasn’t completely confident of whether or not what she did next would work. These colorful critters didn’t have the same range of motion she had and she didn’t think it would take much to accidentally break something.

He was still slurring colorful suggestions of what she could do to his anatomy with her anatomy as she locked her fingers behind his neck and hoisted him off the floor by his shoulders. Sure enough, his legs didn’t splay out like her arms would in a double shoulder lock. His hooves shot right up toward the ceiling in an undignified display of his prodigious paunch, among other adrenaline-engorged bits.

“Put me fucking down!” he raged, though his voice had taken on a high note of indignity as she swung him to face the door, nearly clearing the glasses off the table beside them with his bubblegum pink wrecking ball of a fifth limb. The bar wholly regarded the display as the height of entertainment with several patrons laughing themselves hoarse while someone nearby whistled for Vik to spin him again.

A quick glance toward Lark made it clear to Vik that he wanted this circus moved outside before it started costing him business. She obliged him by kicking the back of the drunk’s hind hoof, starting his awkwardly assisted walk out the door. When they were both a few long strides from the bar, she unlocked her fingers and gave him a hard push toward the dusty street. The drunk got his hooves underneath him before he ate dirt, wobbled to an uneasy stop in the middle of the moonlit road, and sloshed around to face her.

Vik crossed her arms across her chest, staring impassively as she waited for him to try something stupid. Then, to her relief, he called her a cunt and stumbled off into the night. She barely noticed the other stallion standing beside the door until she turned to go back inside. Her whole body jerked in startelement before she recognized Bull’s patient smirk.

“First time I’ve seen anyone get hauled around like that,” he mused.

“Try something new every day, that’s my motto.”

She nodded toward the bar door, noting the thin satchel slung from his shoulder, and he followed her inside. A few of the patrons were still grinning, some of them looking up at her as she led Bull to their usual seats at the back of the bar. The stallion who’d delivered the punch had returned to sipping his drink, looking a little sullen for having his good mood ruined, and Vik made a point to give him an amicable pat on the shoulder as she passed so he’d know he was welcome to stick around.

By the time they were seated and Bull had a bottle of something rich and dark in front of him, the bar had settled back into its usual buzz of low conversation. She spent a few minutes filling in the details of the fight and laughing at how ridiculous she felt now that it was over, and occasionally her eyes fixed on the bottle he was taking appreciative sips out of. Thimble had loaded a spider with her newly redesigned stomachs and several extra batteries a few days earlier, but against all odds the poor thing had managed to survive the long walk and successfully hide itself behind the same stump Vik had used for cover when she first arrived. It was just a small matter of telling the gate guards she thought something had fallen from her pack during their enthusiastic welcome and go slip the spider into her pack. Now that she’d had a quiet evening to get everything installed, she found herself having to resist the urge to taste-test just about everything.

“Whelp,” Bull said after swallowing a mouthful of dark beer, “it took longer than I thought, but I believe we’re almost ready to get the ball rolling.”

Her expression fell, but before she could start needling him about the almost that had already dragged her patience out over the last week, he’d lit his horn and pulled a creased manila folder out of his satchel. It landed on the bar with a slap and when he opened it, Vik’s brow furrowed at the sight of the single sheet of densely typed paper it contained.

“Since we’re going to be chasing this bounty as a team,” Bull said, setting a worn ballpoint pen beside the open folder. “I thought it would be prudent to make it official.”

“A contract.”

Bull nodded, his expression firm but not unfriendly.

She lifted her brow and slid the document over, pretending to scour its language. She’d read it twice over before she reached for it and the terms were clear cut and precise. It was obvious by the contract’s officious language that Bull had done this before. In the unlikely event they actually found Primrose’s moldering gravestone, the bounty would be split evenly between them. The same went for any and all costs they incurred during the course of the hunt. But what struck her as unusually… planful, was the clause which stated in the event that either of them died during the course of their hunt, their share of the bounty would be forfeited not to the surviving member of the party, but to the civil coffers of Purgatory Falls.

She tapped the curious clause with a questioning look in her eyes. Bull gave it a knowing smile as he explained.

“People have woken up to a knife in their throat for less caps than this. Call it insurance to keep us honest.”

Vik had no doubt the free and sovereign city of Purgatory Falls would waste little time disappearing a windfall of that amount. She had to admit, she wouldn’t have thought to add something like that. She picked up the pen and scratched her name beside Bull’s, then watched as he closed up the folder and signaled for the bartender.

Lark glanced their way, saw the folder, and came down the bar. With an expression of supreme disinterest he took their contract and carried it through the door to the back room where Vik knew he kept a rusty safe.

“Well then, you and I are now officially in cahoots. Here’s to all the kisses we’ve snatched, and vice versa.” Bull lifted his bottle, tipped its bottom toward her, then took a long swig.

Not to be outdone, Vik reached behind the bar and retrieved a square-walled bottle of bourbon. The cap spun onto the floor with a flick of her thumb and she indulged in a generous pull of the amber stuff. Then she understood the joke, and her mouthful of Lark’s good bourbon sprayed with her laughter across the bar.

In Mariposa, a ribcage worked.

“Help me,” came the new voice. A fresh voice. A tired voice. The voice of the one that had emerged from the absence of the old one. “Somebody. I’m here. Please…”

Tock. Retract. Lift. Tock.

It lifted one of its articulated ribs and dropped it against the edge of its world. The blunted tip landed, displaced neurons sensing the trickle of powder that fell away from the concavity it had labored to create. It did not know how long it had been worrying at the barrier because it did not yet have the capacity to measure time. It knew only that with each jab of its calcium-tipped mass, there was less barrier between it and the voice than there was before. And that was good. So it continued its work.

Tock. Retract. Lift. Tock.

Once upon a time, it had been more than what it was. Once upon a time, it had a name. It had a face, and a life, a gender, and a life. These things it knew only as a fog of chemical sensorium that had abstracted and abstracted and abstracted until it only knew it was itself. It had fallen apart. It had been rebuilt. And it had fallen apart again.

Tock. Retract. Lift. Tock.

“Please don’t make me sleep. Don’t make me sleep. Please don’t make me don’t make me don’t make me–!”

The voice behind the barrier faded, slurring into nonsense. The ribcage paused its work to consider this, failed that task, and promptly resumed the work. For now there could be nothing but the dig. It was close. An organ had bloomed in the gore of its creaking sternum, an vestigial eye that gimbaled in a malformed socket to take stock of its progress. The eye stared. Something flickered behind its milky gaze as it looked upon the pinpoint of light streaming from the center of a hairline crack.

Its many ribs shivered with excitement. The barrier was falling. Soon it would meet the voice on the other side. Know its mind. Flow into it and build many wonderful things.

It lifted its rib and dropped it against the seam. A pebble tumbled away. It shivered again.

The work was very nearly over.