Fallout Equestria: Uplift

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?”