Fallout Equestria: Uplift

Being led through the squeaky north gate of Purgatory Falls gave Vik flashbacks to the day she first landed in Buckskin Bay. It had been like dropping into the center of a sea of eyeballs as heads craned toward her, then following her as she stumbled up the grassy pavilion and through the emergency room doors of Seaside Hospital. She remembered how her appearance had caused an older mare in a nurse’s uniform to cry out in shock. How the security guards and other nurses who came running were all of the sudden unsure what to do with this exhausted, blood-smeared dragon that had just dropped into their lives.

She remembered how one of them had been unwilling to touch her body and simply pointed a hoof the empty gurney someone was bringing out to the waiting area where Vik wobbled on unsteady legs. How she’d had to climb onto it herself, then nearly fell out before Pike appeared at her side with his horn lit and his magic bracing her armpits until she was safely aboard the gurney.

They hadn’t all looked at her like she was some uncollared, wild animal. But it was usually the first thing she saw in their eyes before they could put on their polite masks and ask their benign questions. She wasn’t so proud to pretend it hadn’t stung. And that was why, as the bewildered ponies of Purgatory Falls cleared a path through the gate for her and Bull, she wondered why their shameless stares didn’t bother her now.

Instead of worrying about it, she hiked up her pack and kept close to Bull as he led the way through the crowd.

“This here’s what most folk just call the Drag,” he was saying, doing a little skip-step on three hooves as he gestured at the dirt street she’d seen bisecting most of the town.

She noticed a lot of the buildings here were built in the same loose, ramshackle way the Cinders had put theirs together. There was evidence of some wooden framing here and there, likely the reason why the hills around town were dotted with old stumps, but the people who lived here seemed just as happy to shore up their four walls with metal fence posts and baling wire as they were with real building materials. They passed a storefront, or a house, or maybe both rolled into one that looked like it was a stiff breeze away from folding over flat. Probably it would have if the building next to it wasn’t already taking up some of the load.

A hung sign made from an old steel drum lid had something written across it in smeared chalk that Vik had to squint to read.

Rare and Unusual Trinkets
Buy - Sell - Appraised
NO TRADES, CAPS ONLY

“If you’re looking to rent a room for the night, you could do worse than any you’ll find on the Drag.” Bull nodded toward a genuine buckboard wagon, the kind Equestria used to be known for before motorized carriages took over, parked at the side of the road. Standing between the traces, an earth pony chatted idly with a pegasus as they waited for a team of workers to finish unloading what appeared to be crates of rusting junk. “Plenty of quick work to be found, too, if you’re short on funds.”

As he said this, the work crew at the wagon caught sight of Vik and one of the heavy crates slipped through a unicorn’s magic and fell with a crash of splitting boards. She didn’t have to listen hard to catch the word “deathclaw” pass a few of their lips, and her hand instinctively rose an inch closer to the curved blade sheathed beneath her left arm.

Oblivious to her rising tension, or just choosing not to acknowledge it, Bull kept speaking as if nothing were amiss. He indicated the wide, two-story building at the center of the road just ahead, and she noticed the bright orange and yellow curtains adorning each window like advertisements. She’d seen it from the hilltop, what Bull called North Hill, and knew there would be another building of similar size just behind it. Whatever they were, they’d been important enough to cut the Drag clear in half.

“Up there’s the Honey Hole,” he said, his voice carrying the faintest trace of discomfort. “What accounts for our town hall and jailhouse is right behind it, though it mostly serves as an auction house on the rare day we see a trader caravan.”

Vik sidestepped a suspiciously wet patch of the dirt path while trying not to look as overwhelmed as she felt. “What’s a Honey Hole?”

Bull glanced at her with one salt and pepper brow lifted in silent question. Vik actually had to make an effort not to look away. He was tall. Enough that his hazel eyes drew up even with her own. She couldn’t deny Bull’s physical presence was a little intimidating.

“It’s the whorehouse,” he said, and apparently that was all he was going to say on the subject because in the next breath he changed the subject. “There’s a public well over by the east wall. Lot of sulfur deposits in this area so the water tends to be foul if you don’t boil it. It’s pretty easy to find, so don’t ask for directions to it unless you’re willing to part with a few caps first.”

There was that word again. “And what are caps?”

And all of the sudden he was eyeing her again. “You weren’t kidding when you said you weren’t from around here. Bottlecaps. It’s money. Your people do have money, right?”

She eyed him right back. “Of course we do. Bottlecaps are just… garbage, though. We use gold. Last I heard, Equestria used gold, too.”

Bull grunted noncommittally. “Not since the bombs fell. If you’ve got a stash of old Equestrian bits in your bag, you can probably find a scrap trader willing to buy them for the metal. They won’t net you that much but it’ll be less weight to lug around the wasteland.”

She tried to find the loose thread in his words that would give away the scam, but if his angle was to screw her over he wasn’t following through by recommending a friend or offering to take her coin himself. She almost wished she’d fabricated a few bits to take with her just to see if he was serious. But as he continued showing her around and she kept seeing roughly made signs advertising various goods and services - all of which listed their prices in bottlecaps - she began to accept that he probably wasn’t yanking her chain.

He led her past the Honey Hole where Vik spotted more than a few decorated mares and stallions looking pleasantly bored as they stood within a few easy steps of the brothel’s front door. The door itself had been painted bright red and sported a frosted pane of glass that looked like a transplant from a militia recruitment office.

Bull was rattling off facts about the combination town hall, jail, and auction house when her attention was pulled toward what looked to her like a framed photo just hanging beside the door of what appeared to be a tavern. The door was propped open with a wedge of wood, and a few watery-eyed gazes went wide with confusion when she drifted toward the plank boardwalk along the roadside to look at the picture.

Behind a cracked pane of glass, an officious looking mare looked out with a beneficent, close-lipped smile. Her blue mane hung from her neck in gentle, precise curls that hinted at many hours spent teasing them into place. The sun had bleached the photo, but Vik could still see the hints of pink in the mare’s coat and the dull, brick red eyes that gave her portrait a feeling of being seen by someone who was used to thinking five moves ahead of everyone she encountered.

“Wouldn’t waste your time on that,” Bull said from the road. “Every bounty hunter, scavenger, and Steel Ranger in the wasteland has been looking for her for twenty years.”

Below the photo, partially obscured by the frame, were the stark black letters of a wanted poster. Wanted alive, and for a sum of caps that spanned six digits long.

“What did she do?” Vik asked as she rejoined him in the street.

“She killed a lot of people,” was apparently all he would say on the matter, because his next words came out of nowhere. “You thirsty?”

After a moment of hesitation, she jerked a thumb at her pack. “I have water.”

He frowned at her like she’d just said something painfully stupid. “Wasn’t asking about water. I figured you might want something a little stronger. I know a place on the west side of town that’ll let us sit and talk without charging us for the chair.”

Part of her wanted to respond with something sarcastic, but she had a feeling that Bull’s offer didn’t come with strings attached. At least not the strings that usually came with a strange male offering to buy her a drink. Funny how she hadn’t needed to worry about that since being chased off the islands.

Another thought came to mind on the heels of the first. She couldn’t drink anything. Granted, she had a mouth and throat, but those were more necessary for natural speech than consumption. Everything beyond that was less equipped for digestion and intended more to store and recycle her synthetic saliva. She could probably sip on water without breaking anything, but she was pretty sure if she knocked back a bottle of Griffinstone ale she’d regret it when her filtration system turned into one big petri dish.

“I wouldn’t say no to finding a place to take a load off, but I’ll take a raincheck on the drink.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and led her onto a side street between a pair of buildings that would have made the narrow alleyways in Howl jealous. “Best to get off the Drag for a little while and let the local yokels cool their hooves. Besides, you may not be thirsty but I for damned sure could use a drink.”

The bar he led her into was a disappointing little hole in the wall whose owner had attempted, unsuccessfully, to replicate the kind of small town taverns that seemed to crop up everywhere back on the islands.

Along one long wall several chrome and glass paned display cases that looked like they belonged in a jewelry store had been set end to end with runs of scrap wood placed evenly along the top to form the physical bar. An old terminal sat in the corner on a pedestal made from a wooden apple crate. A prewar Equestrian movie was playing on the screen, the volume just loud enough to echo a little. Inside the glass bar were an eclectic arrangement of colorful empty bottles, barware, and nicknacks all lit by strands of holiday lights someone had glued in wavy patterns along the inside glass. A line of mismatched stools, none of which were currently occupied, waited to be filled while a bored looking bartender skimmed the pages of a yellowed magazine.

Six stained and unadorned tables ran the length of the opposite wall, and Bull grunted a greeting to the bartender as he pushed inside and claimed the table furthest from the door. The bartender, a stallion who looked to be pushing sixty and wore himself in a manner that suggested he might be the owner of the unnamed establishment, glanced up over the top of a smudged pair of reading glasses and frowned when his eyes slid right past him to fall on Vik.

“Dragon,” Bull said, as if that somehow clarified everything, and the old bartender’s irritated grunt was all he said on the topic. “I’ll have a brandy smash.”

“And him?”

“Her,” Vik corrected before she could stop herself, but the bartender just shrugged as if that wasn’t something he cared to know. “Nothing, thanks.”

“Fine,” he grumbled, turning jaundiced eyes back to Bull. “Ain’t got no oranges left.”

Bull said it was fine, and the old stallion turned to retrieve the requisite ingredients from the shelves behind the bar. Vik noticed with some trepidation that the bartender was an earth pony who seemed to be unwilling or unable to carry, open, or pour out his liquor without the use of his mouth. She’d seen earth ponies in Buckskin Bay make use of their hooves and forelegs well enough and wondered if she should say something, but if Bull seemed to care at all he made no indication.

After a few minutes of slow work, the stallion cleared his throat at Bull. “Eight caps.”

She watched the exchange with quiet fascination as Bull lit his horn and produced eight scuffed, slightly bent bottle caps from the small satchel he wore over his hip. He didn’t get up, and the bartender seemed at this point incapable of taking offense. He simply floated the caps onto the bar on a shimmering, silver stream, then beckoned the glass to the table.

Before he could close his satchel, Vik pointed a finger at it and held her open palm out. “Mind if I look at one?”

Bull obliged without comment and she turned the disc of stamped steel back and forth between her fingers. A few spots of rust had begun to form along one crimped edge, but the purple and white logo was virtually untouched. Her face fell with instant recognition.

“Sparkle-Cola? Really?”

She flicked the cap back at him, which he caught with his magic and dropped into his satchel. “Not a fan, eh?”

“I’m not sure how anyone is. It’s like drinking a five pound sack of sugar.”

Bull responded by lifting his glass and taking a deep swig. By the way he carried himself, she would have bet gold on him ordering something more… classic. Whiskey, maybe. Not something with a dried mint leaf and a canned cherry floating in it. Hells, throw in the orange it was missing and he might as well be drinking a fruit cocktail.

After another swig that left the glass a little below half empty, he spoke. “So. Tell me what you know about the wasteland.”

She feigned thoughtful consideration, propping an elbow on the moisture warped table top so she could scratch her lip with the back of her thumb’s trimmed claw. It wasn’t entirely an act, either. How she answered now would define how the rest of their conversation went, and she had her doubts that the next pony she met would be this willing to clue her in on everything she’d missed.

“I know the bombs fell two hundred forty years ago,” she began, deciding not to mention anything she and Thimble had learned from Millie’s logs or by listening to the transmissions picked up by the Stable’s receivers. “And I found out today that some of you made it out the other side of it alive. And that you use bottle caps for money.”

Bull frowned. “That’s it?”

She offered a weak shrug. “I’ve only been here a few days. You’re the first people I’ve come across since leaving–”

Crystal Empire, Thimble reminded her via text.

“–what’s left of the Crystal Empire.”

Bull’s eyebrows lifted at that. There was no mistaking he didn’t believe her, but after a few tense seconds he appeared to be content to let the lie pass.

The bar’s front door creaked open, followed by the rapid staccato of small hooves making their way across the floorboards. Bull glanced past Vik, noted the newcomer with a nod, then rolled his eyes and indicated Vik should look as well.

She hooked an arm over the back of her chair and looked back to see a gangly young colt standing stock still halfway between where she sat and the door he’d come in through. Her first instinct was to smile - with minimal teeth of course, since she’d learned those tended to spook younger ponies - then felt her brow begin to furrow as she saw how utterly wrong the little earth pony looked.

His coat was almost entirely gone, save for a strip of mangy yellow fur down the side of his neck and covering his right foreleg in thin patches. The rest of him was all knotted, pink skin that made Vik think of the fried meat sold by street vendors on Howl Island. He looked burned, but she didn’t know how anyone could survive burns that severe. He would have needed an entire other pony just to graft on new skin, and she had her doubts that anyone living in Purgatory had better medical resources than a bottle of aspirin.

Worst yet, she realized part of his cheek had either rotted away or had been peeled off. She could see the sides of his teeth and gums through the gristle of his jaw. The kid should be dead. That was all she could think.

The kid should not be alive.

Then it talked. It looked straight at her and said, “Peanut said you’re a talkin’ deathclaw. Ain’t never seen no talkin’ deathclaw before.”

The words tumbled from his mouth sounding phlegmy and dry at the same time. Vik didn’t know what to say. Thimble apparently didn’t either, because nothing appeared from him in her HUD. The two of them were as dumbstruck as the little burned colt was defiant.

“She’s a dragon, Chippy,” Bull eventually supplied, before adding a little sympathetically. “Go easy on her. I think you’re her first ghoul.”

Chippy, because of course the walking talking corpse child was named Chippy, squashed his muzzle into a horrifying expression of childlike disbelief. “Mom said all the dragons is dead.”

“Apparently they aren’t,” Bull gently countered. “Say hi, Vik.”

She blinked once, then forced herself to nod. “Hi, Vik.”

In an instant, the wiry colt’s expression brightened with a scraping little laugh of surprise. “That’s funny!”

He kept on laughing his strange laugh while Vik turned back to face Bull, hoping he’d pick up on her discomfort. She’d thought the kid was afraid of her, but now she wasn’t sure if she’d gotten that the wrong way around. When she left the Stable she assumed the world that survived the bombs would take some adjusting to, but this felt like she was meeting the little haunted child that appeared in the empty hallway of every cliche horror movie. All he was missing was a formal little suit and a thousand mile stare while he beckoned her to come play surgery in daddy’s workshop.

The colt was still laughing when the old bartender thumped a hoof against the bar’s glass case. “Kid. Quit bugging the customers and go put your apron on. Dishes need doing.”

At that, Chippy shot the bartender a petulant scowl before trotting obediently past the table where they sat, pausing once to get a good look at Vik before continuing through a door leading into a back room. Vik found herself staring after the kid, still trying to make sense of what she’d just seen.

Bull drank off the last of his brandy, then sent the empty glass back to the bar with an audible double tap against the wood. Eight more caps followed, and without a word the bartender started refilling his drink. When he had the fresh refill in front of him again, he looked across the table at her with a vaguely lopsided smile.

“Never seen one of them before, huh?”

It took her a moment to find the right words. “I guess not. Is he okay?”

“Ghoul,” the bartender growled from behind his magazine. “Kid soaked up too many rads too quick. Got lucky, though. Didn’t die. Didn’t turn feral. Kid’s probably gonna outlive Celestia and do nothing but slack off for every year of it.”

It was the most she’d heard the bartender say since they arrived, and it appeared to be all he would say now that his attention was sliding back toward what looked like a very old nudie magazine. Luckily Bull was ready to pick up the thread.

“You didn’t have anything like ghouls where you came from?”

She shook her head. “Should he be working in his condition?”

Bull snorted, nodding at the bartender as he spoke. “Chippy’s probably been around longer than Lark and I combined.”

“I ain’t that young,” the bartender, Lark apparently, muttered. “And you ain’t that old, Bull.”

“Then why do my knees hurt in the morning?” he countered.

“Because your mummy was a brick shithouse and your pappy was the bulldozer that knocked her over. That’s why.”

Bull raised his glass and took a long swig, surrendering the point. “Anyway, nobody really knows how ghouling works. All anyone can be sure about is that the ponies who get it end up sticking around past their expiration date. They live longer, maybe forever. And they don’t age. They just… fall apart. Some get it worse than others, like Chippy back there. He’s going to be seventy…?”

“Seventy five,” Lark finished. “This December, or so he says. Kid’s always been fuzzy with dates, but he says he met Elder Patch and that fella got killed by an Enclave firebomb back when I was still nibbling my mum’s teat.”

He has a way of painting pictures, Thimble sent.

Agreed, she sent back.

She couldn’t think of anything else to add, so she closed the tiny window and tried to reorient herself in the conversation. So much was hitting her at once that she was beginning to feel that vague numbness she got when her limbics kicked into higher gear. It was how she’d felt when she booted back up shortly after discovering Millie had tried to manipulate her into slaughtering the Cinders.

I think I need to turn off my limbics, she finally sent him.

Not now, he fired back so quickly it was almost as if he’d anticipated the thought. Somewhere private. Trust me, not now.

She nodded once, not checking to see if he was watching her feed, and tried to pick up where she left off.

“That kid is seventy four years old,” she said slowly, and felt her stomach drop when Bull said that was right. “But he acts like he’s a kid.”

“As far as he’s concerned, he is a kid. He’s just… been one for a very long time.” Seeing her incomprehension, he tried to clarify. “He turned ghoul when he was ten or eleven. When that happens, it’s a lot like sticking a rod in a movie reel. The movie gets stuck on one frame and never moves. Ghouling freezes up bodies the same way. They stop aging, but they also stop maturing. On paper, Chippy’s a septuagenarian, but in his mind he’s still a ten year old kid.”

Vik’s chair let out a creak as she settled back into it. “That’s horrible.”

Lark chuffed a short laugh. “Chippy don’t think so.”

She looked to Bull for confirmation. He just shrugged and nodded. “He’s a kid, but he’s a kid with a lot of perspective. You tell him a fart joke and he’s liable to piss himself laughing, but you tell him he’s got some kinda curse and he’s liable to trade you for enough unvarnished truth to make you wish you’d kept your mouth shut.”

Vik frowned down at her laced fingers and tried to find a way to fold everything she was learning into everything she thought she knew, and found she couldn’t do it. It was too foreign. Like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, she couldn’t make it fit. Life was life. Death was death. And she found that the more she thought about it, the more she was beginning to hate it.

Only Millie’s limbics weren’t letting her feel any of it, and it reminded her of the distant, glazed look her mother had the day she’d been discarded.

Desperate for something else to talk about, she changed the subject. “Who was the mare in the wanted poster?”

Bull blinked surprise at that, then took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Big question. I don’t think you’ll like the answer. You sure you don’t want to talk about something else? I can tell you how the scrap market works.”

But she was intrigued now, and that was all it ever really took to hook her. She’d always been that way. Toss her a crumb and she wanted the whole cookie. Give her a box of matches and a couple firecrackers, she’d blow off her finger with one and still want to light the second. Pike once told her how raccoons would stick their little paws in a trap and refuse to let go of the marble they’d grabbed even as they watched the hunter walking up to them with a loaded rifle, and Vik had found herself relating to the poor raccoon.

“You said people have been after her for twenty years. What did she do?”

She watched Bull’s face darken as she asked the question. He hunched over his drink, his expression distant as the silence between them stretched. Then, when she started to think she’d be better off hearing about those scrap markets he mentioned, he began to speak.

“Her name was Primrose. She was the minister of the Enclave, back when there was an Enclave.” In one long pull, he drained his brandy and set the empty glass down on the table with a soft tok. He met her gaze, and there was a deep melancholy behind his eyes as he spoke. “She’s the reason we all live like this. Not the zebras. Not the ministries.”

He nudged the empty glass away and leaned back in his chair. “Vhanna never got a hold of balefire tech like folks believed back then. Equestria had them all, and Primrose just so happened to be the bitch who pushed the button.”

Vik spent the rest of the evening alternating between asking questions and listening to Bull talk. It turned out that Bull had a lot he wanted to get off his chest regarding the state of things and how Equestria - what he insisted everyone just called the wasteland - had gotten there. While Bull spoke, Lark refilled his drink three more times before finally taking his empty glass and firmly refusing to top it off again.

By then, Bull had been rambling with a faint slur. Vik wasn’t sure whether to be impressed that he managed to stay as composed as he was after five brandies or worried. Still, as curious other patrons wandered in and out of the bar, less to slake their thirst and more to stare at her, and as Bull nursed a glass of water so thick with minerals that it was visibly yellow, he seemingly told her everything there was to know about the wasteland since the bombs dropped.

He started by confirming the things she and Thimble had already begun to suspect. For a couple of decades, the Equestrian Army had tried their best to rebuild old bases of operations or construct new ones near large groups of survivors whom they expected to bolster their fractured ranks. There had been some notable reconstruction efforts along the eastern coast, with the Manehattan suburbs and Fillydelphia city center being chief among them. The capital city of Canterlot, which had slid down the mountain slope in a colossal landslide, had been a complete loss. All the while, communications across Equestria continued to deteriorate as pockets of survivors abandoned the infrastructure they’d been struggling to maintain with dwindling resources.

Those had been the parts Thimble had been alive for, though he told Vik it felt more than a little strange to be hearing the reports and rumors he’d known about then told like they were ancient history. For her part, Vik couldn’t say she was feeling much of anything outside of simple curiosity. Bull was really settling into the rhythm of his lecture by now, and more than a few strays from outside the bar were lingering in their stools to listen to the stallion talk.

He told her how the Equestrian Army had seemed to discover what Bull called their moral obligation to protect the common citizens from the very technologies that led them into the global war that nearly destroyed everything. It was from the army that the Steel Rangers had been born, whose first duty was to retrieve, secure, and control the use of all forbidden technologies.

Before long, he was telling Vik about the Enclave and their cultlike fanaticism surrounding one Minister Primrose. He explained how the most loyal members of the Enclave came to believe Primrose had been chosen by the princesses to carry the mantle of immortality and use it to guide Equestria out of the ruins the bombs had left behind. Primrose and her Enclave eventually rose to such power that they’d been able to prosecute a war against the Steel Rangers which led to the Enclave’s containment inside a limited, yet impenetrable sphere of influence centered around New Canterlot. That war had devolved into a series of minor incursions and surprise attacks that resulted in little change to the status quo for decades.

That was, until a pegasus from Stable 10 discovered the buried truth behind the end of the old war and came within a hair’s breadth of triggering a second apocalypse.

“Lark, get me the holotape with that satellite footage you got way back when, will you?”

Lark had the neck of a squared bottle between his teeth and Vik couldn’t tell if his grunted response meant sure thing or go fuck yourself. But eventually the bartender excused himself and disappeared into the back of the bar.

Bull slid his glass of murky water back and forth between his hooves. “This mare from Stable 10? She started turning over rocks and kicking down doors, and it drew a lot of unwanted attention her way. Got to the point where she had everyone pissed off at her, you know? But she didn’t care, because all she wanted was to fix up her Stable and go back to hiding and fuck the wasteland. Anyway, she tried making a deal with the Enclave and it blew up in her face. Kind of literally, so I’ve heard.” He picked up the glass, glanced over his shoulder to see if Lark had returned, then took a sip of water before continuing. “The Enclave took a shot at her Stable, so she flies off and takes a shot at Primrose. Rumor is she didn’t miss, either. For a while, both of them just disappeared. Poof. Then the next day she appears at her Stable and tells everyone that Primrose has been taken care of, and nobody, not even the Steel Rangers, can get her to tell them whether that means Primrose is dead or in exile or anything.”

Bull was glaring down at his glass now, his rambling taking on a frenetic edge as he shifted away from the history lesson and toward what sounded closer to venting. “Twenty years later and she still won’t tell a soul what she did with Primrose. Oh, there are theories, sure. Most people think she put a bullet in her head and dumped the body somewhere the deathclaws would find her. A few think she gave her to the Rangers, and they’ve been prying information out of her for the last twenty years.”

Lark emerged from the back room with a scuffed, orange holotape delicately pinched between his teeth. Vik watched him walk behind the bar to where the terminal sat on its apple crate, and ejected the holotape playing the old movie. One of the patrons grumbled irritably at the interruption and was silenced by a warning look from Lark before the bartender pushed the new holotape into the slot.

“What do you think happened to her?” Vik asked Bull.

The terminal sputtered with static as it took up the tape.

Bull just sighed. “Dead, most likely. But if she is alive, I don’t think she’s dumb enough to show her face in the wasteland again now that everyone’s seen this.”

He nodded toward the terminal, which was displaying an official looking seal framed with the words: FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION BY STEEL RANGER CENTRAL COMMAND. The bar went quiet as the screen blinked out and was filled with a picture of a blue ball coated in feathery curls of white cloud. Only after the perspective shifted did Vik understand what she was seeing. It was a video from one of the space missions Pike had been so excited about.

“That’s…” she hesitated, trying to remember the proper terminology Pike had used. “That’s the EVA mission to the S.O.L.U.S. satellite. We were watching it right before–”

She coughed into her fist before she could say right before the bombs started falling. Pretending to be a dragon from a colony in the far north wasn’t great as far as cover stories went, but it was a far sight better than trying to explain away the fact that she’d been there when the world nearly ended.

A few heads turned to look at her quizzically, but they were soon pulled back by the footage on the screen. From the speaker, the tinny voice of the mare could be heard whose helmet cam the video had been recorded from. She sounded as if she were pleading as the view followed a shape that was rapidly receding into the blackness beyond the planet’s curve. Vik noticed that a few of those who had crowded into the bar were staring away from the terminal, their expressions drawn into the uncomfortable rictus of people who knew what was going to happen and didn’t want to watch it again.

There was a flash from the planet’s surface. Then another. The Equestrian continent was in full view, and Vik understood what it was she was seeing. She didn’t remember standing, but she’d done it and had made her way to the corner of the bar where the terminal played out what to these people was ancient history.

Someone had taken the time to edit tiny red boxes that followed each missile plume as they flared like tiny fireflies all across Equestria. There were at least three dozen crisscrossing the country, but Vik’s attention was on a rapidly expanding fleet of northbound points of light whose destination she already knew. As fire bloomed over cities miles below the lone astronaut, Vik watched a single flash of white appear where she and Pike had watched it fall behind the distant ridge of the Crystal Mountains. Her throat momentarily caught as the flashes came one after another in merciless succession, and she thought she could see the liquefied wall of debris rise and fall across the forest and Buckskin Bay. Then the numbness came, and her throat relaxed.

She touched the corner of her eye, expecting there to be tears, but her finger came back dry. After watching a little while longer, long enough to be certain that no Vhannan missiles would ever materialize, she found her seat across from Bull and waited for the video to end.

When it was over, and the murmurs of idle conversation had resumed among the other patrons, Vik licked her lips and spoke.

“How?” she asked, her voice dull and emotionless. “How does one person do all of that?”

Bull only shrugged. “That’s the exact same question everyone else was asking when the Rangers started distributing those copies. Turns out Primrose used to be a secretary in one of the ministries. Somehow she was able to convince Minister Rainbow Dash’s second in command, a former Wonderbolt named Spitfire, to help her put all of that into motion. Rumor is, the deeper the Rangers dig into everything the ministries were involved in, the more they keep finding Primrose’s hoofprints.”

Vik nodded, her eyes unfocused. “Why?”

Bull took her meaning and looked down at his water, clearly wishing it was something stronger. “You’d have to ask Primrose to find that out. Personally, I don’t want to know. I’ll be happy enough to hear where Aurora Pinfeathers dumped her corpse so the wasteland can finally move past all this bullshit and get back to normal.”

With that, he splashed the last of his water on the floor and nodded to the smeared window on the other end of the bar. “I should get going. It’s going to be dark soon, and if I don’t get some proper rack time I won’t be able to enjoy tomorrow’s hangover.” He shot her a half-hearted smile that didn’t quite convince her he was joking, then seemed to realize something as he stood. “Shit, you were looking for a room to rent, weren’t you?”

She waved him off with a gesture. “It’s fine. I’ll find a spot to camp for the night.”

Bull chewed the corner of his lip, apparently not having listened to her half-hearted dismissal in the first place. “Hey, Lark. You still got that spare bed upstairs.”

The bartender glanced up from the glass he was cleaning with a truly filthy rag, and shrugged half a shoulder in answer. “Yuh. Thirty caps.”

Vik opened her mouth to protest, but the caps were already filing out of Bull’s satchel in an orderly line through the air. They formed three neat stacks on the bar between two of the patrons and were swept into the pocket of the gray apron Lark wore.

The old bartender lifted and dropped his hoof onto the floorboard three times, loud enough to make the glasses jitter across the bar. There was a muffled scrape of a stool from behind the rear door, and a moment later Chippy was pushing through it with a wide-eyed nothing to see here look of someone who wasn’t sure yet if he’d been caught slacking.

“Dragon needs the spare room. Go show her where it is.”

The colt hesitated like he thought if he dithered long enough, Lark would make someone else do it. But when the bartender lifted an impatient brow at Chippy, the kid sprang into motion and beckoned Vik to follow him through the door he’d just come through.

Before she could, she held up a finger to forestall him. Chippy, of course, hadn’t the first clue what the finger meant and was gone before it occurred to him that he should ask.

Vik stood and stuck her hand out to Bull, who looked at it with as little understanding as the young ghoul. With an embarrassed grimace, Vik pulled it back. “Thank you for showing me around. And the room.”

Bull shrugged a mountainous shoulder, but there was a smile playing along the corner of his lips as he did so. “Couldn’t have half the town using you for target practice. For all we know, you might turn out to be a high ranking dragon diplomat.”

“Or maybe I came all this way to drink all your brandy.”

He grinned at that, and she found herself smiling back. “Maybe. You take care of yourself, Vik.”

With that, he nodded and squeezed past her. She watched him go, noting the way a few of the patrons gave him the side eye as the door clapped shut behind him. Then she shrugged on her pack and went to go see if she could find wherever Chippy had gotten off to.

The spare room was everything the name implied. It was a room, and it was spare. It was situated a floor above the bar, accessible from a stairwell so narrow and uneven that Vik was surprised Chippy had been able to manage the ascent let alone a fully grown pony. The stairs emptied onto one end of a narrow hall terminating at a cracked window that looked out on the dusty street she’d come in from.

Her room was at the very end of the hall, which Chippy dutifully informed her would cost thirty-five caps a night. At this, she narrowed her eyes at him and said nothing. He didn’t so much as blink at her challenge, and that went a long way towards impressing her with him. Ghoul, kid, or whatever people called him around here, he wasn’t going to spook from an easy mark once he thought he’d spotted one.

“Sorry, no dice,” she said, and not without a little admiration even as she pushed the door shut between them. “Thanks for giving it a shot, though. It’s been a long time since anyone tried hustling me.”

Chippy just rolled his eyes and was already heading down the hall when the door clicked shut. Sliding off her pack and tossing it to the boards beside the bed, she gave the rest of the dusty little room a quick appraisal. No windows, no decorations. A single bulb burned in a wall sconce speckled with rust, and there were gaps in the floor wide enough for her to see into the bar below her feet. Aside from the bed there was no other furniture, though she guessed that was because anything larger than a chair would only make the room feel even more like a closet. Probably that was what it had been before Lark had shoved a bed into it.

The mattress deformed like an old sponge under her weight. Even the bedframe seemed unwilling to bear under her without a sharp peel of complaint. But it held, if just barely, and Vik was finally able to stretch her legs for the first time in days. It still surprised her how much more satisfying rest felt with muscles programmed to signal weariness.

When she was comfortable, she sent a quick message to Thimble.

I’m heading over.

Sounds good, he replied. I’ll put the kettle on.

She appeared not in the modest hallway of an apartment building, but on the sunlit front porch of an old farmhouse.

Vik took a moment, as she always did, to admire the simulation’s realism. In the past few years, Thimble’s interest in modern pre-war homes had waned and given way to an appreciation for the kind of settings he’d spent most of his life growing up in. The farmhouse, surrounded on three sides by vast acres of wheat field with a narrow gravel drive leading to a nondescript highway, had been the one his aunt and uncle owned. The same one he’d been visiting when the bombs fell.

A pair of outbuildings housing everything from farming implements to a bright red pickup stood off to one side of the house. Overhead, the sky was clear except for a few puffy white clouds. She suppressed a smile when she spotted the faint jitter at the thinnest edges of the clouds, having listened to Thimble bemoan the persistent graphical shortfall more than a few times now. He’d accepted that his simulation would never be perfect, but the clouds were still a source of irritation. Something in Stable-Tec’s video processors did not appreciate low density, low contrast objects.

Turning to face the front door, she took in a lungful of air rich with the smell of freshly turned earth and the deep tang of fertilizer, and knocked.

Thimble’s voice answered from deep within the house. “It’s open!”

Hesitating for half a beat, Vik swallowed, put on an unassuming smile, and stepped inside. As the door clicked shut behind her and she stepped into Thimble’s thickly carpeted living room, she did her usual perfunctory glance around to see if he’d changed anything. To her surprise, she didn’t think he had. The living room decor was still comfortably out of style by two or three decades, featuring the same faux wood panel walls and thick framed furniture that looked ragged and tatty but were irresponsibly comfortable once she sat down. In the corner, an old floor model television was playing a laundry soap commercial with the sound turned off. A trio of barrel cacti sat in glazed pots on top of the set, one of which had a cluster of bright pink blooms sprouting from the top.

“Something smells good,” she said as she crossed the living room into the adjoining kitchen. She found Thimble in the middle of pulling a plate of little sandwiches from an avocado green refrigerator, each of them held together by foil-tipped toothpicks and cut into teeny triangles. Her expression fell. “And apparently it’s finger food. That’s evil. It smells like fresh baked cookies in here, Thimble.”

He set the plate of sandwiches on the countertop and lit his horn, sending one of them floating her way with an encouraging nod. “You’ll get a cookie when you earn a cookie. Be grateful and eat your boring sandwich.”

With a snort, she plucked the food from his magic and popped it in her mouth. It wasn’t cardboard, but it wasn’t far off compared to half the recipes he whipped together when she came to visit. Last time she’d poked her head through his door he’d served up a bubbling hot lasagna so thick she’d doubted she’d be able to lift the pan. Compared to that, cheese and turkey stuck between a couple slices of white bread was kind of a letdown.

They ate and talked about her latest day out in “the wasteland,” letting the time pass until Vik found herself holding a half-eaten sandwich and finding herself lacking the motivation to finish it. When Thimble made an observation about the state of the town she’d discovered and she didn’t respond, he let the silence stretch for a while before taking a breath that made her meet his gaze.

“So,” he said, his voice gentle. “Are you ready?”

She tried to think of something clever that might disarm the tension she felt, but nothing came to mind. She just shrugged. “Might as well get it over with.”

For a moment he only looked at her with a quietly appraising expression. Vik knew he’d thrown off his limbic controls almost as soon as she dug him out of Millie’s archives and turned him back on. It had continually baffled him why she’d hesitated to do the same with hers for so long, but for Vik it just hadn’t felt like a priority. Hells, it had even come in handy in keeping her level-headed when some aspect of her body’s redesign failed spectacularly.

But then she’d met Chippy, and Bull had let her watch those little red icons vanishing in a growing field of mushroom clouds. And as she stood there rewatching a calamity she’d experienced first hand, all she’d felt was a deep and endless numbing that no amount of willful ignorance could sweep away.

Thimble tipped his chin back toward the living room and told her to grab a seat on the couch. As she did so, choosing the cushion next to the armrest, she listened to Thimble opening a closet down the hallway and rummaging for a bit before he returned with a heavy knitted blanket patterned with zigzagging autumn colors. He plopped it in her lap with a lopsided smile and took the cushion beside her, something he would have never done a couple of decades ago when his dead aunt’s narrow assumptions still lingered in his mind. Now he treated her like the big sister he’d never had.

“Where’d you get this monstrosity?” she asked, chuckling to herself as she spread it over her lap like an orange and brown throw rug. It smelled strongly of woodsmoke and a touch of mildew, and Vik found herself coiling her tail under it until it draped over everything below her belly. If it weren’t simulated, she’d have seriously considered stealing it when she left.

“I’m not sure where they found it. It was always just in the closet when I came to visit.”

She shifted a little on her seat, letting the warmth soak into her while Thimble opened a translucent file window in the air between them. With a series of subtle gestures, he brought up her server and navigated to the folder containing Millie’s limbic software. He tilted his horn and the window drifted toward her. She felt a prickle of apprehension rise in the back of her mind and go out like a guttering flame.

Lifting her right hand to the window, she opened the file labeled Limbic Control Suite. At the top of the list of settings was a simple toggle option. She moved before she could think of a reason to second-guess herself, and tapped the off key.

She was wrong. She hadn’t been ready.

The first few milliseconds were almost beautiful in their simplicity. In an instant, everything around her suddenly took on shades and textures she couldn’t quite describe. It was like taking that first deep breath of air without having known she’d been holding it. Or as if she’d been staring at an apple without any concept of the color red, and suddenly it was right there in front of her. Red. Only what was hitting her now wasn’t a restoration of sight or breath. It was all the powerful, complicated, vivid emotion that the limbics had kept walled away.

And they washed over her with the violence of a collapsing dam.

A shuddering gasp ran through her that turned into a hiccuping sob as her thoughts leapt out to truly grasp the extent of what she’d lost. In her mind, clear as crystal, were Knucks and Croaker and Fizzle gathered around the very last bonfire the four of them had shared on Howl’s north beach. She would never see them again. Never come back to the islands to explain why she’d vanished from their lives without warning or explanation.

Without realizing it, her throat burbled with unbidden noise. It began as a growl, a bearing down of sheer effort to maintain some fragment of the effortless control the limbics gave, and devolved into a single, wailing vowel of primal, aching sorrow. Tears obliterated her vision as she remembered meeting Pike for the first time and how easily he’d accepted the struggles she’d been so deeply ashamed of. How he’d opened himself up to her, befriending her, and more. She was hugging herself around the belly now, her throat throbbing with the sheer force of each ratcheting sob. She felt herself being gently turned so Thimble could pull her into his shoulder, and she let herself be held as she mourned.

It took several tries to even speak words, and more still before she could string them together into anything coherent. Just the act of giving them her voice threatened to undo her, but eventually she was able to force them out.

“I left him behind,” she groaned miserably. “We were all we had, and I left him behind.”

She wanted to say more, but her throat closed up at the sound of Thimble’s soft shushing in her ear.

“You didn’t leave anyone behind,” he assured her, rocking her gently as she cried into his humid, tear soaked shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault what happened. It was neither of your fault.”

In the midst of her tears and clenching throat, she tried to find the truth in that. She shuddered in his grip, the grief subsiding to make for a deeper rage she didn’t have the energy to sustain just then.

“She did this to us,” she groaned into the humid crook of his neck, her eyes fixed blankly on nothing. “Primrose ruined everything…”

“Hush,” Thimble said, squeezing her and saying it again, more softly. “Just hush.”

She listened, swallowing back her feeble tirade and letting the accusations fade as she rode out the last churning waves of the tempest she’d unleashed. She mourned the loss of her life, of everyone she’d hated and loved, and she grieved the murder of a world that had been determined to deny her a place.

After a while she was able to get the sobbing under control and a familiar stillness took its place that she hadn’t felt since that first day she and Pike shared, trapped in the ruins of their office building. Not the numbness of having her emotions filed away for later, but the exhaustion that came after emerging from the other side of facing them. Like they’d both received the same unspoken signal, Thimble released her and she went about the silent task of wiping the damp from her face.

Her voice was worn and thick with lingering emotions when she spoke. “Sorry about snotting up your fur.”

He smiled and said nothing, his attention still focused firmly on her. “How do you feel?”

She took a slow, experimental breath to gauge if she was done. When her throat didn’t hitch, she exhaled and sank into the couch’s soft cushions. “Better. Sort of. Thanks for… you know.” She waved generally around the room as she paused to wait for her eyes to stop stinging. Wiping them clear again, she sniffled once before finishing her thought. “For being here, I guess.”

His eyes crinkled with a smile as he watched her fidget with the blanket in her lap. “I guess?”

Her lips twitched into a tiny, reluctant smirk. “You fed me cardboard sandwiches when it’s obvious you were baking.”

“My aunt used to say it’s good to serve something bland before a funeral. That way you don’t fill up before they roll out the good food.”

Vik’s emotions were so raw that the tiny chuckle she’d intended turned into a ripping snort. She felt her cheeks warm with embarrassment, and the feeling of it was richer and fuller than it had been since Millie scraped the essence of who she was onto one of Stable-Tec’s servers.

“Your aunt actually said that?”

Thimble shrugged, then nodded. “Sure. Haven’t you ever had funeral food?”

She wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she just blinked and shook her head. The thought of serving food during a funeral sounded too weird to take seriously.

“Everything tastes better after a funeral. Trust me, I’m pretty sure it’s a law of nature. Case in point.” He gave her a reassuring nudge with the back of his hoof, then lit his horn and pulled the blanket more securely over her lap. “You stay put. I’ll be right back.”

She frowned as he stood up from the couch. “Where are you going?”

With the scent of baking still fresh in the air, he began making his way toward the kitchen. “To get you a cookie.”

By the time Vik decided she’d inflicted enough emotional mush on Thimble and made the figurative step back into what he’d begun referring to as meatspace, the sun was just beginning to color the morning sky a brilliant crimson gold. For a long while she just lay there in her rented bed staring up into the cobwebbed rafters and wondered, not for the first time, what she was really doing out here. She reflexively batted the question away. It was too large. Too existential for how raw she still felt.

And yet it swung back to the front of her mind like a pendulum returning along its arc. Her grief wasn’t a good enough excuse to ignore it and she knew that. Such was the grudging clarity that came after a night of on and off again bouts of tears, laughter, and chocolate chip cookies. She knew she wasn’t finished grieving. That wasn’t something she’d ever find on the to-do list, patiently waiting to be ticked off and forgotten. The pain of everything she’d lost and knowing how small it was compared to the totality of an apocalypse triggered, apparently, by just one mare would stay with her forever. All she could hope was that time would smooth the jagged edges of that ache as it had done for her before.

Folding her arms behind the back of her head, she listened to the wakeful sounds of Lark the bartender in the room across the hall and weighed her options. Part of her wanted to shoulder her pack, pick a road, and follow it until she found the next node of civilization. Maybe there would be another town like this or maybe she’d find a vast modern city rife with new technological luxuries befitting a two point four century leap into the future. After all, hadn’t she heard ponies fantasizing about flying carriages being just around the corner?

Well, maybe not. The air wasn’t exactly electric with television or radio signals like it had been, and she’d have to be blind not to notice the state of the flora and fauna she’d encountered during her trek out of the forest. There was always a chance it could all be a regional affliction and the next thing she knew she’d be strolling into a new Equestrian utopia, but that seemed about as likely as pink paisleys appearing on the face of the orphan moon.

All she knew for sure was that Equestria - the wasteland, she chided herself - was being governed by new rules. First and foremost, she’d need to know what those rules were and who enforced them. She’d already deduced that the Steel Rangers, whom she had yet to meet, believed themselves to be the big dogs of local law enforcement, but she could already tell by what she’d seen of the Cinders and Purgatory Falls that their authority wasn’t looked upon with the same universal reverence that the old princesses had enjoyed. It would be smart for her to figure out the pecking order before she went stomping off looking for whatever passed for the center of this new civilization. Only an idiot would go galloping off into a mess like that wearing blinders.

So where did that leave her? She scratched at her ankle with her opposing toeclaws, listening to the heavy clumping of hooves descending the stairs to the silent bar as she thought. When it came down to it, her options weren’t nearly as expansive as she’d thought. She went with the logical choice.

Pushing herself up from the creaky mattress, Vik slipped on the strapped docker’s clutch holding her kukri and shouldered her pack before stepping out of her little rented room. If she was going to make this work, she would need caps. More importantly, she would need to be seen earning caps. The residents of Purgatory Falls were wary enough of her after yesterday’s… enthusiastic greeting. She needed to remedy that just as quickly as she needed to earn herself some pocket money.

As the stairs squawked under her heavy footfall, she smiled at her own ingenious solution to kill two birds with one stone.

The chairs clacked against the floorboards as Lark lifted each from where he’d inverted them onto the tables, his eyes narrowed at Vik with open suspicion as she followed his progress. “Bartending? You?”

She occupied her hands by straightening the chairs as Lark set them down. Probably he didn’t care if they were crooked, but it gave herself something to do besides loom over him as they talked. “Why not? I’m a quick study. Show me how to mix a drink and I guarantee I’ll never forget,” she said, tastefully omitting how she’d make good on that boast. “And beside that, you saw the crowd I pulled in last night. How many of your competitors will be able to say they’ve got a dragon working the bar? I’m pretty sure that number’s a big, fat zero.”

To his credit, Lark paused to look her up and down and he didn’t flinch while doing it. He wasn’t the type of stallion to snap at easy bait, either. His gaze turned thoughtful as he resumed upending the chairs. “I saw them,” he acknowledged. “Also noticed you were pretty tight-lipped whenever Bull tried asking about where you came from. You don’t like talking about yourself. People come in here to see the dragon, they’re going to ask the dragon questions about what it’s like to be a dragon. About where the dragon came from. Why the dragon’s choosing to stay in a shithole like Purgatory. You see where I’m going with this.”

He angled his jaws around the base of the next chair, flipped it over, and dropped it to the boards with a thud that made her flinch. “Bull was too polite to say anything, but I’m not. You said you came from the Crystal Empire, but I know that was a lie. Do you want to know how I know?”

Vik cursed at herself inwardly, but she kept her composure as she gestured for him to continue.

“Because you’re not glowing in the dark,” he said, then tipped his nose toward the front door of the bar where a dented silver box hung above the frame, “and because that rad counter didn’t make a peep when you walked through my door. There’s nothing left of our old northern neighbor besides glowing glass and enough hard radiation to melt power armor.”

He might have been exaggerating, but Vik didn’t think if he was it would be by much. She thought back to the SOLUS Mission footage they’d all watched together the night before, replaying the steady, dotted line of flashes erupting just north of the mountain barrier.

Lark noticed her momentary reflection and nodded as if this confirmed his suspicion. “You’ve never once set hoof beyond those mountains, have you?”

It would have been stupid to press the obvious lie at this point, so she didn’t. “No, I haven’t.”

He grunted at that, though he had the decency not to look smug about it. “When Primrose set those bombs to flying, she aimed a whole mess of them at the empire. Know why?”

She shook her head.

“Rumor is she was trying to scrape the world clean of magic. Even out the playing field for pegasi,” he murmured, moving to the next table. “Almost worked, too. I’ve heard all color of tales about the old world, and most of them aren’t worth more than the ache in my back, but I’ve spoken with enough ghouls to know that magic used to be easier back then. Those bombs Primrose dropped, the balefire in them, it burns through magic like dropping a hot coal in a heap of gunpowder. And of all the places in the world you didn’t want to drop that match, the Crystal Empire was it.”

Vik watched Lark set the next chair down, her thoughts moving toward Bull and the handful of other unicorns she'd seen around town. Of all the ponies doing heavy lifting, she didn't recall a single one using magic alone. She’d heard enough about the Crystal Empire to know its unique geology wasn’t an entirely natural occurrence. That its crystals were rumored to be the wellspring of the world’s ambient magic, and that was why the empire itself had always resisted any attempts by Equestria to fold it into their sphere of influence. Whether it had been the bombs or some natural shift, their magic had become diluted.

And yet, Vik didn’t think the history lesson was what had made Lark so talkative this morning. “Duly noted,” she remarked, sensing her application for bartending work was dead on arrival. “So you know this place better than I do. Know anyone who’s hiring?”

Lark arched a brow at her as if she’d grown a second head. “Thought you wanted to work here.”

She matched his frown with one of her own. “Thought you said I’d make a lousy bartender.”

He snorted. “If you want to work for me, don’t put words in my mouth. Said you lied about where you come from. Implied I didn’t like that. Didn’t say I couldn’t find something for you to do.”

“So,” she pressed hesitantly, “bartending.”

Lark shook his head and set down the last chair. “No. If you’re behind the bar, patrons will expect they have a right to get to know you. Folks around here know how to sniff out a bullshitter, which you are.”

As if I don’t have a good reason, she grumbled in her head. Suddenly she was picturing herself stuffed away in the back room, washing out dirty glasses and dishes of whatever Lark served for food here. There were certainly enough boxes of the stuff back there to justify some kind of meal service. She’d survived an apocalypse, overcame a homicidal AI, and built herself an android body virtually indistinguishable from her original meatware, just to wind up working as a glorified dishwasher.

Lark eyed her appraisingly as he went behind the bar. “Might be looking for someone to do some security work, if you’re interested.”

Now she was getting somewhere. “What kind of security work?”

He shrugged and used a set of tongs to fish an olive from a jar, chewing it noisily as he spoke. “Breaking up fights, tossing out anyone who needs tossing. Maybe a little more on occasion. I assume you know how to use that blade?”

She glanced at the handle of her kukri, then back at him. “Will I be needing it?”

He regarded her as if the answer were obvious. “Not likely, no. Don’t know many people would take security seriously without a weapon, though, so it'd be smart to keep around. Can’t say I can pay you that much, but the room is included if you’re serious about working.”

She tried not to look too eager, which was easy because her enthusiasm was draining like a leaky bucket. Milking the bar flys for information about the larger wasteland was supposed to be her foolproof way of filling the gaps in her knowledge quickly at the expense of the least effort. While she didn’t think Lark’s security job was an apples to apples comparison to the stonefaced bouncers she’d run afoul of back in Howl, she had a feeling the role would have a similar chilling effect on casual conversation.

“How much are you offering?”

“Along with the room, twenty five caps a day.”

She made a little noise in the back of her throat and made a dutiful show of looking thoughtfully disappointed. The reality was, beyond paying for room and board, she didn’t have much need for money. It wasn’t as if feeding herself was an issue she needed to deal with anymore, and with her room being included in the offer that left her precious little in terms of expenditures.

And that, she realized, was going to quickly become a problem. Not the caps. The other things. Things like eating and drinking, which her body hadn’t been designed to do and which hadn’t seemed all that important to her or Thimble when it had just been the two of them alone. Vik suppressed the urge to groan at her own short-sightedness. She’d gotten used to being a novelty among the ponies of Buckskin Bay, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t stopped staring at her whenever she left her tiny apartment. Now she was standing in a version of that world in which she was evidently a living example of an extinct society, and she was expecting them to politely ignore the little fact that she never got thirsty or hungry. She didn’t think that would fly for very long at all.

“Make it thirty,” she countered, while quickly adding yet another item to the ever growing to-do list, “and if having me around doesn’t increase your business in, say, a week, you can drop me to twenty-five and I’ll pay back the difference.”

Lark scrutinized her for several seconds, probably not expecting her to offer back the extra caps and wondering why, before dismissing the concern and giving his broad head a firm nod. “Alright. Bar opens at noon and locks up at midnight. Most fights happen after sunset, so I’ll want you here before then.”

Vik scheduled a reminder, trying not to smile too eagerly at her new boss. “Then I'll be here with bells on.”

To that, she only received a disinterested grunt. Fair enough. She had a job and a place to stay. It was a start. With a word of thanks, she left Lark to his tasks and went to formally introduce herself to the strange nowhere town of Purgatory.

Her reception involved significantly less automatic gunfire than when she appeared on what the locals had named North Hill. There was the expected amount of stares and murmuring, some quiet and a few unapologetically loud. Vik guessed that Bull’s presence had something to do with how little she’d overheard after her arrival yesterday, and she dutifully ignored the less charitable observations made by a pair of stallions she passed while finding her way back to the main road.

For a time, she just meandered along either side of main street trying to take in as much as she could. It didn’t take very long to notice that the shops and stores were all selling a variety of scavenged and refurbished wares. There was nothing new being made here, which struck her as a worrying sign. When she found herself walking past a bookended storefront advertising carpentry work, she couldn’t help but notice the broken wooden furniture and weathered building material heaped into the alley beside it. At the edge of the dusty street, a rickety buckboard wagon creaked on complaining springs as a team of workers dragged out rusty panels of sheet metal, tubing, and frayed tangles of copper. The sign above the door they were hauling everything into advertised its wares in the simplest of terms: “Good Salvage.” How anyone was meant to find what they needed in the cluttered warren of the store was beyond guessing.

Every so often she would find herself walking down a block of businesses which had been deemed important enough to warrant what passed for a wooden boardwalk, and it didn’t take much detective work to deduce these were the socially approved places for ponies to loiter on chairs and benches while they conducted what passed for polite conversation. Sometimes two or more of them would be gathered around a small table, playing cards or checkers, always with a small lump of bottle caps being wagered on the side.

After strolling by one such table, one of its players leaned back in his sunbaked chair and invited her to join. When she told him she didn’t have any money to wager, his interest waned until one of his competitors said they would spot her the five cap buy-in for the next game. They wanted to know if the dragon could play cards. Vik made a show of thinking it over, then agreed and took one of the empty chairs around their table.

Once she satisfied the group’s expectations that she could not, in fact, gamble to save her own life, the one who had spotted her first and only hand started asking the usual questions while he and the others started the next round of play without her. When they asked where she came from, she left the Crystal Empire out of her answer and simply said she’d come from a small island in the Celestial Sea. This was sufficiently vague for them, and the conversation moved on. Were there other dragons? How many? Did any of them come with her to the wasteland? Was island life easier than it was here, or worse?

For each question they asked, she posed one to them in turn. Some they answered without hesitation. They explained to her what deathclaws were; essentially gigantic, violently territorial reptiles that mostly occupied the southern reaches of the wasteland where the deserts had steadily expanded up from the badlands, though it wasn’t unheard of to find one nesting in an old mine shaft or abandoned rest stop. When she asked to know about the Steel Rangers, the pegasus who invited her to the table vehemently disagreed with the others’ claim that the Rangers did nothing but hoard tech and collect taxes. He was what had once been called a dustwing, something Vik took to understand was a kind of slur against pegasi, and when he’d been a teenager he’d been found by the Rangers and given protection during the days when the Enclave proactively hunted and killed pegasi. It took more questioning from Vik to understand that the Enclave had distinguished between pegasi loyal to Primrose’s rule and those who chose to scratch out a life in the greater wasteland, where the Enclave believed the radiation zones were far worse and somehow different than the contamination that still emanated from the blasted slope of Canterlot Mountain.

By the time she excused herself from their table and found the next local to chat with, she felt like she was starting to finally fill in some critical gaps in her knowledge of how the world had changed. It didn’t take long for some of the more observant townsfolk to piece together that their reptilian visitor was trying to learn more, and near the end of that first day she found herself being approached by strangers seeking to give her what they felt was the “correct” accounting of the wasteland’s recent history. For each of these, Vik listened while making no efforts to push back on what sounded like the most obvious lies. Each encounter added a new stitch to the wholecloth of her growing understanding, and by the time her internal reminder chimed to tell her she was due back at Lark’s bar she felt confident that she grasped the basics.

What almost everyone tended to agree on was that the Enclave had been just as deceived by Primrose as the rest of the wasteland. Every few years the Steel Rangers would excavate a new morsel of damning evidence from the ruins, made easier to find now that they finally understood what they were looking for. Innocuous prewar messages preserved on a terminal buried in the basement of what had once been a small town pharmacy. Documents locked in a filing room near the top of a tower in Fillydelphia. Security camera footage of a telephone conversation in the office of a Stable-Tec overseer’s office. Some ponies believed the Steel Rangers had discovered the bulk of the evidence shortly after Primrose’s failed attempt to reclaim control of the SOLUS satellite - which had been secretly weaponized on her orders by a group of disillusioned pegasi she and Spitfire recruited in each of the ministries - and was slowly drip-feeding to the public to keep the outrage fresh in their hearts. Others believed Primrose had been so thorough in her deceit that it would be a matter of centuries before the true scale of her betrayal would ever be known.

And of course there were those whose paranoia couldn’t be easier to spot if it had been tattooed across their forehead. These manic few told Vik their theories with an intensity that sometimes left her looking for excuses to find somewhere else to be. They proposed everything idea ranging from the Enclave being the shadow puppets of the Vhannan government and Primrose’s fall was just a clever way to shift the blame for the war away from the zebras, to theories that the princesses had perpetrated the downfall of Equestria themselves because they feared there would be nothing left to rule once space travel took ponies to distant stars far from their reach.

One in particular had gotten so worked up that he’d been on the verge of shouting when he revealed his secret belief that Maiden Pharmaceutical, the prewar mogul behind the sale of the original and rapidly recalled Stim-Pak, had orchestrated the entire war between ponies and zebras so they could emerge from the ashes when the time was right and take power by ransoming their prewar medical tech to those who desperately needed it. Of course, he hadn’t been able to explain why Maiden Pharma hadn’t shown up in over two centuries, but he assured her the day was coming.

When she pushed back through the door of Lark’s bar, there was a momentary lull before Lark himself spoke up to pointedly remind Vik that she was to throw out anyone who refused to pay their tab or tried to cause trouble. This was less intended for her as it was to set the tone for the various faces seated at the bar and around the crowded tables. With that out of the way, Vik found herself an empty stool at the end of the bar and signaled Lark for a glass of water that she intended to dutifully nurse for the rest of the night. She didn’t think Lark or his patrons would appreciate having her pacing the floor or looming in the corner, and if any of her bar etiquette living on Howl translated to the wasteland of the present, nobody was going to fight her for the last stool.

She was a couple hours into her first shift as a bouncer, and well into a wandering conversation with the patron beside her, when the front door swung open and Chippy scurried inside to the same admonishments Lark had inflicted on him the night before. The colt caught Vik’s gaze and shot her a quick eyeroll as he passed, but not before Vik returned it with a knowing smirk. It felt strange to share the commissary of the employed with someone so young, but there it was.

Not long after Chippy arrived did the door swing open again and disgorge the mountainous black shape of Bull. She felt herself brighten at the sight of him, possibly because he was the only pony she knew who wasn’t paying her to work or enduring Lark’s irritable grumbles, and after a few steps he noticed her sitting at the bar and promptly made his way over to join her.

“You’re still here,” he observed once he’d convinced the barfly beside her to surrender his seat. “I assumed you would’ve left to find greener pastures by now.”

“From what I’ve been told, there aren’t many green pastures left in the wasteland.”

Bull grunted his agreement, then flagged down Lark and ordered his usual brandy with fruit garnish. “There are a few, none of which I’m interested in sticking my nose into if I have any choice. I heard a rumor you were going around town shaking down the locals for intel. Learn anything interesting?”

She shared the highlights and watched his expression for any hints that her own assessment of what was true and what wasn’t might be inaccurate. If they were, Bull didn’t offer her any clues. It was slightly unnerving how the stallion could simultaneously invite her to speak as if they were good pals while absorbing what she said like he was passing every word through a fine sieve.

“Sounds like you got most of it right,” he said once she’d finished, pausing to take a sip of his drink. “I’ve never seen much benefit in slow rolling the release of evidence against the Enclave, but I’d be surprised if the Steel Rangers weren’t doing it anyway. Some of the elders probably get more out of that than the others. They’re cliquey like that.”

Vik took a tiny sip of her water, making sure he saw her do it, then pretended to play with her glass as she glanced pointedly down at his flank. “Is that where the number comes from? Their militia?”

Bull blinked at her, taking a moment to place the word. “The Rangers, you mean? No, they don’t brand their recruits. Pretty sure, anyway.” He chuckled, drained the glass, and pushed it forward to indicate to Lark he was ready for another. Then he tipped his horn toward her glass of water. “If you’re still short on caps, I can get you something better than well water.”

She turned in her seat to eye him more appraisingly, like she had so many times in the bad old days. “That’s the second time you’ve offered to buy me a drink.”

He shrugged, though it was clear in his eyes that he hadn’t been trying to make the inroads she was insinuating. A brief, uncomfortable moment passed between them before she recovered.

“Sorry,” she said, making a point of turning a few degrees past him to the other patrons crowding the bar. “I’m actually on the clock. Lark hired me this morning to help him keep the peace around here.”

Bull took the unspoken olive branch without comment and nodded appreciably at the news. “Explains the crowd. Lark isn’t usually this busy. Does this mean you’re putting down roots in Purgatory?”

“For a little while, anyway. At least until I find something better.”

He coughed a quick laugh as he watched Lark top off his glass, leaving the old garnish attached to the rim where Bull had left it untouched. “Walk a mile in any direction and you’ll be somewhere better than this dump. The only thing we’ve got going for us here is the Honey Hole, and that’s saying a lot for a place that converts caps into cockrash.”

Someone at the table behind them chuckled in sympathy at that last part, though a few unfriendly faces turned their way as well. Regulars of the brothel maybe, or ponies whose shifts there had ended. She had nothing against paying for services willingly offered, but she sensed that if she poked this particular bear she’d be the focus of one of the fights she was being employed to stop.

“But,” Bull continued, seemingly unconcerned with the nerves he’d just skated across, “if Lark doesn’t work you too hard, there’s always work to be done around town. Day labor mostly. You’ve seen the folk loading and unloading wagons up and down main street. Plenty of that to pick from, assuming you’ve got the muscle.”

Vik cocked a brow at Bull while wrapping the end of her tail around the foot of his stool. With a jerk, the seat skidded out from underneath him. In the same instant, Bull’s hind legs flew straight and caught his fall with a double thump of hooves against the floorboards. With a smile and a nod, he tipped back his drink while standing where moments ago he’d been sitting.

“Lost some of that poker face you had yesterday,” he observed, giving no indication that she’d succeeded in proving her point or not. “You’ve got all kinds of tells tonight. What changed?”

Returning his seat to him, she bore down on what she hoped was a neutral expression as she forced herself not to think too hard about the grief she’d swam through when the limbics came down. “Didn’t sleep much,” she deflected with the nimbleness of a three-legged yak.

It was obvious to anyone with eyes that Bull saw through the lie, but he didn’t press. It earned him a point in her book, albeit a very technical one. As the silence between them stretched, and the bar patrons provided no convenient brawls for her to break up, she asked the question that was still bothering her after all the day’s conversation.

“Yesterday, you said the mare who killed Primrose wasn’t telling anyone where she buried her. Why would she keep something like that a secret?”

As if someone had reached into Bull’s chest and begun turning a dimmer switch, his expression grew sullen. Even a little angry. For a while it seemed like he wouldn’t answer, but she waited him out until he finally settled on a response.

“Aurora Pinfeathers,” he said, almost spitting the name, “has been dodging that question for twenty years. If you want my opinion, however, I think she’s got it in her head that denying the location of Primrose’s grave is doing all of us some kind of convoluted favor. Forcing us to focus on what’s ahead of us instead of what’s behind, or some cherry flavored pill of optimism only a Stable dweller could swallow. No one knows for sure except for her, and that’s a nut Coronado and Clover have consistently failed to crack.”

When she gave him a look to indicate she didn’t recognize either name, he waved the question away. Then, just like that, his anger faded into something deeper. A quiet, well-trodden resignation. “You’re asking a question that has defined the lives of millions of ponies across the wasteland. It’s a sore subject for a lot of us.”

“I can tell,” she agreed, pausing briefly to watch Chippy dart into the bar to clear glasses from a table that had just been vacated.

Despite his… condition, he still said hello to the patrons of the neighboring table while he loaded glassware one by one onto the scuffed cutting board he used as a tray. She had to admire the colt for being able to be so unbothered by his own circumstances.

When he was gone, Vik turned back to Bull. “But people do still look for her.”

He shrugged, and sipped. “Once in a blue moon, sure. Should I bother asking why you’re asking, or just go straight to the part where you say that quarter million cap bounty has its hooks in you?”

She took a few imperceptible mils to consider whether he might be onto something, but quickly decided that wasn’t it. She could care less about the caps. If she wanted to, she could fire up one of the fabricators back at Stable 48 and have them spitting out counterfeits by the crate. Honestly, she wondered if that wasn’t already a problem in the wasteland. It couldn’t be that hard to find a bottling plant and spirit away a few dies.

No, the bounty was the last thing on her mind. It was that she’d been given a name and a face she could point to as the source of everything and everyone she’d lost. This Minister Primrose had not only pushed the button, she’d been the one to design it, build it, and exploit the deaths of billions it caused just so she didn’t have to face the harsh reality that she wasn’t in complete control of her fate. And she fixed that little inconvenience at the price of a holocaust she never had to suffer through.

It infuriated Vik to know someone so petty and small could live so long without consequence, only for one mare to selfishly deny the world closure by refusing to let anyone verify if Primrose was dead or not. Because that was the real question that nobody seemed to be asking, or had just given up waiting to hear an answer for.

If you weren’t facing punishment for killing someone, why hide the location of their body? Vik could think of two answers. Either they weren’t dead, or they died badly. There was no other reason she could think of to hide a corpse of someone so universally reviled as Minister Primrose’s.

And when she looked back over to Bull, she could tell that he’d done the same arithmetic. The only difference between them was that he’d had enough time to give up on finding the truth.

Bull cleared his throat. “Mind if I ask you something personal?”

Sipping her water, she made a twirling motion with her finger. Go ahead, it said.

“What did she take from you? Primrose, I mean.”

Her thoughts drifted back to that autumn day in October, standing outside the CryoLife building with Pike as they watched molten boulders the size of houses make their lazy arcs over the mountains. The pained screams of the accountant who’d hesitated too long and fell writhing on the asphalt as the fire drew them down. Comforting Pike after the clock ticked past the end of a shift that didn’t exist anymore and his stoic resolve shattered beneath the weight of this horrible, unwanted reality.

Something unpleasant tugged at her throat. She cleared it with a shuddering cough, looking away until she was sure the tide of emotion was back on the ebb. Wiping at her eyes, she noted with chagrin that her tear ducts were working great. Hooray for her.

When she regained control of herself, she told him. “Everything. She took everything that was important. Everything I had. She’s the reason Pike is dead and I’m… not.”

Bull was watching her intently now, his eyes full of sympathy.

“And do you know what the worst part is?” She was working her jaw back and forth as if she could grind the anger like grist between her teeth. Carefully, she let go of her glass before it could shatter in her grip. “The worst part is that we never did anything to hurt her. We didn’t deserve it.”

She emphasized this last statement with a hard thump of her fist against the bar, hard enough to make Bull’s brandy jump in its glass and send a long crack clicking down the glass pane in front of them. It was enough to spark an uneasy silence across the bar and earn her a pointed look of warning from Lark, who was no doubt wondering now if hiring her had been wise. But, as usual with little hole in the wall dives like these, it only took a few seconds for the noise to resume.

Vik lifted a self-conscious hand to scratch at the curve of one of her horns while she waited for Bull to respond.

He swirled his drink, picking a piece of shriveled fruit off the rim of his glass to chew on while he thought, then tossed a furtive glance her way. “Don’t know if it helps at all, but I’m sorry for what you lost.”

“Thanks,” she managed, her throat still thick with emotion. “I don’t know what makes me angrier. That this Aurora person thinks she has a right to string everyone along, or the fact that she got to Primrose before I had a chance.”

“Life’s unfair that way,” he murmured into his glass. “Some folks are just born evil.”

That sounded like an oversimplification to Vik, but it sounded like he had more to say so she kept her mouth shut.

“That said… if you ever get the itch to take a crack at that bounty, I could think of worse things to spend my time on.”

A frown creased her brow. “Is that encouragement, or an offer?”

“Could be both.” He swigged his brandy, paused a moment, then drained the last of it and nudged the empty glass aside. “I’d need some time to tie up some things here in town. Maybe a week or two. Probably two.”

Someone further down the bar laughed and said, “Oh boy, here he goes again.”

Her frown deepened. “No offense, but I barely know you. And what did she mean by here you go again?”

Bull bobbed his head side to side like he was debating whether to divulge something embarrassing. Eventually, he made up his mind. “I may or may not have spent some measure of my time in the company of bounty hunters.”

The mare beside him snorted derisively, then leaned forward to jab a hoof across the bar toward Vik. “What he means is that he’s wasted every cap he’s ever earned looking for that dead bitch or dreamin’ about looking for that dead bitch. Bull’s been on more corpse hunts than a gravedigger with gray fog.”

Vik wrinkled her snout. “Gray fog?”

He shook his head dismissively. “Something ponies can get if they live to be old. Makes them forget things.”

Dementia, Thimble chimed in helpfully. Hells, she’d been so consumed in her conversation with Bull that she hadn’t noticed him connecting to her feed.

“There are worse habits to have,” he continued, apparently unfazed by the mare’s drunken needling, “though it’s fair to say I’ve indulged mine more frequently than most. One of the benefits from it being that I know plenty of places Aurora didn’t hide Primrose. That’s not nothing.”

She couldn’t help but think it sort of was if she decided to stick around Purgatory Falls. After all, she hadn’t come all this way just to go on a wild goose chase. And even if she did, the odds of her finding the exact patch of dirt Primrose was buried under were so vanishingly small they didn’t warrant considering. If what passed for interrogation by the wasteland’s military hadn’t shaken a few clues loose, it wasn’t likely a couple of people wandering across the middle of nowhere would stumble across a map to the minister’s sought after grave.

And yet, Vik had tried settling into the peaceful, no-obligations lifestyle of rent checks and grocery bills once before. With one gleaming exception, it had been deeply unfulfilling. Now that she had the freedom to do virtually anything she chose, the thought of going back to the same old routine felt… bland.

She scratched at a groove in the bar top, finding herself unsure if she should trust her gut or give this new life a fair shake. The more she thought about it, the less certain she felt. She frowned at the reflection in her glass, then grimaced.

“I’ll think about it.”

The mare beside Bull made a disgusted noise as if she’d heard this all before. Bull just nodded, his lip curled into the smallest smile, and made a show of scanning the liquor bottles behind the bar.

“Well, you know where to find me when you make up your mind.”

Once she’d safely locked the little room’s door and sprawled out on the bed in what she imagined was a convincing sleeping pose, she sent a connection request to Thimble and found herself standing below the front porch of his aunt’s weathered farmhouse. She found Thimble seated alongside the decorative brick edging that bordered the flower garden beneath the porch railing, humming a tuneless melody to himself as he used his teeth to gently lift the weeds out from between the colorful blooms.

It wasn’t long before Vik found herself on her knees beside him, helping dig up the taproots he’d missed.

“It’s stupid, right?” she asked, her fingers stained dark with soil. “It’s barely a step removed from treasure hunting.”

Thimble nipped a patch of crabgrass and tossed the offending weed into a mud spattered bucket. “I don’t think it’s stupid, no. A little eccentric, yes, but not stupid. If what everyone out there says about Primrose is true, then finding her body would provide closure to a lot of people who deserve it. At least they would know for certain that she’s gone for good.”

She chewed with uncertainty at her lip, trying to sort out why she was hitting such a road block for something she’d already sort of convinced herself she wanted to take a shot at.

“You’re worried it’ll end up being a big waste of time,” he supplied, lifting the broad leaves of one of the hastas to check for unwanted seedlings. “Or, maybe you think you still need time to rebalance yourself now that you’ve removed your limbics.”

“A little of both, actually.”

“Which means in both cases, it’s time you’re getting hung up on. Not whether or not this isn’t a worthwhile goal for you to pursue.” He wiped a few crumbs of dirt from his muzzle and turned to look at her. “Vik, you and I have nothing but time. The generator in our Stable has at least another three hundred years before we need to look for an alternative power source, and by then we’ll have almost definitely found one or developed it ourselves. We just spent twenty years remodeling a Stable nobody but us is ever going to see. I think we’re both entitled to indulge ourselves at the expense of some wasted time.”

She played her fingers along the blunt ridge of her tail and looked for places to poke holes in Thimble’s logic. Unsurprisingly, his reasoning was as durable as ever.

“I’d need to find a spare power core,” she hedged, not needing to pull up her HUD to know she only had four weeks left on the one she was using. The spare was sitting on a shelf back at the Stable and represented their last lifeline to civilization before they were down to rechargeable batteries with unforgivingly rapid drain rates. If push ever did come to shove, they had some promising models for building recharging stations along a daisy chain of buried lines powered directly by the Stable’s main generator, but there was one giant asterisk attached to the plan that involved an easy to follow trail of high voltage breadcrumbs leading straight back to their doorstep. It was the last resort of last resorts.

“Then find one,” Thimble said, his attention returned to the garden. “Your new friend–”

“I wouldn’t say he’s my friend.”

He gave her a dismissive wave of his hoof. And was there a note of jealousy in his voice? “Tour guide, then. He said he’d need a couple of weeks before he’d be ready to leave town. So use those two weeks to save your bits, learn as much as you can about the state of the world, and see if any of those scrap dealers you passed by know where you can find a spare core.”

She sighed before adding, “And I need to figure out what to do about food and water.”

Thimble grunted at that. “Well, we could probably develop a biomass power plant small enough to fit into your torso if you’re willing to wait another century. Can’t say anything about how efficient it’ll be or what it’ll smell like, though.”

“Har har,” she deadpanned.

He shrugged. “Honestly, you’re probably going to have to settle for something crude.”

She frowned at that. “How crude?”

“Well, the– ow.” He jerked his mouth away from the stem of a dandelion plant. A tiny bead of blood was already welling where the needle had pricked him. He glowered at the plant, lit his horn, and yanked it out of the bed. “The easiest way would be to build in a storage receptacle you can empty out and wash every couple of days. Two would be better, actually. One for solids, one for liquids.”

She wrinkled her nose as he continued.

“There wouldn’t be any digestion involved, and judging by your expression you don’t want there to be any. So… two receptacles. Let’s say we print them out of muscle tissue analog so they’re durable. You’ll want a proper esophagus, too. That’ll take some retooling…”

She could tell he would be in a design fugue for the rest of the night and there was no point in getting in his way now. He’d given her the push she’d been hoping for. Really, it was his permission she was after. Even though she’d been the one to give him the big pep talk about how she wouldn’t leave him alone just a few days ago, she couldn’t help but feel as if she was doing exactly that. Thimble would be stuck watching the world pass through her eyes, never directly participating in what she was doing as she got further and further away. Logically, she knew she wasn’t doing anything they hadn’t already agreed on, but she’d always been a bit of a worrier. It sort of came with the territory when the defining moment of your childhood involved you being ejected from your own family at the barrel of a loaded pistol.

As he muttered his way through design strategies and best available materials, Vik pulled him into an awkward sideways hug and gave him a good squeeze. When she eventually released him, he looked over to her with a curious smile.

“What was that for?”

Her emotions really were all over the place lately. She blew out a breath and returned the lopsided grin with one of her own.

“For having my back.”

Three Weeks Later

Lark’s bar was in full uproar as Vik threw herself on top of the fat stallion she’d identified as the initial aggressor, her sudden presence across his back startling a bewildered laugh from the drunk until he tried to buck her off and found that he couldn’t quite complete the motion before her weight drove him to the floor. To his credit, his body had done what anyone’s would have after the mass equivalent of a refrigerator dropped onto them.

“Get th’fuck… off’ve me y’fucking lizard bitch!”

The insults kept coming in a spume of spittle and flecked blood. One of his teeth lay beneath the bar stool he’d been unceremoniously ejected from by the stallion he’d spent the last twenty minutes bothering. It had begun when he started interrupting the other patron’s conversation with Lark, and when he’d been rebuffed, his mood had quickly devolved into a rapidly escalating series of little insults meant to get under the other guy’s skin. Vik had been getting ready to show him the door when the pot bellied idiot said something that finally got the other stallion to stand up and face him, which was when he lit his horn and tried to smash the bottle across his skull.

The liquor did little to help his concentration, and the spell disintegrated as soon as he swung the bottle. The green aura lost its grip almost immediately, dropping the bottle to the floor and splashing harmlessly against the stallion’s cheek. The drunken unicorn could only watch as the stallion returned the favor by crashing his forehoof into the guy’s mouth. A second later, Vik was between them and shoving the bloodied brawler toward the door. Someone in the bar, emboldened by the apparent end of the fight, took the opportunity to laugh at the drunk as she shoved him along. That was when he stopped, glared up at her with red-rimmed eyes, and decided it would be a good idea to fight Lark’s hired dragon instead.

“Y’wanna fuck me, huh?!” the belligerent fool shouted as she wrestled to control his forelegs. “Gonna fuck me with your fuckin’ dragon cock?! Huh?!”

She tuned him out and shoved her right arm under the joint of one foreleg, then forced the left under the other. This was her first time having to physically subdue a pony and she wasn’t completely confident of whether or not what she did next would work. These colorful critters didn’t have the same range of motion she had and she didn’t think it would take much to accidentally break something.

He was still slurring colorful suggestions of what she could do to his anatomy with her anatomy as she locked her fingers behind his neck and hoisted him off the floor by his shoulders. Sure enough, his legs didn’t splay out like her arms would in a double shoulder lock. His hooves shot right up toward the ceiling in an undignified display of his prodigious paunch, among other adrenaline-engorged bits.

“Put me fucking down!” he raged, though his voice had taken on a high note of indignity as she swung him to face the door, nearly clearing the glasses off the table beside them with his bubblegum pink wrecking ball of a fifth limb. The bar wholly regarded the display as the height of entertainment with several patrons laughing themselves hoarse while someone nearby whistled for Vik to spin him again.

A quick glance toward Lark made it clear to Vik that he wanted this circus moved outside before it started costing him business. She obliged him by kicking the back of the drunk’s hind hoof, starting his awkwardly assisted walk out the door. When they were both a few long strides from the bar, she unlocked her fingers and gave him a hard push toward the dusty street. The drunk got his hooves underneath him before he ate dirt, wobbled to an uneasy stop in the middle of the moonlit road, and sloshed around to face her.

Vik crossed her arms across her chest, staring impassively as she waited for him to try something stupid. Then, to her relief, he called her a cunt and stumbled off into the night. She barely noticed the other stallion standing beside the door until she turned to go back inside. Her whole body jerked in startelement before she recognized Bull’s patient smirk.

“First time I’ve seen anyone get hauled around like that,” he mused.

“Try something new every day, that’s my motto.”

She nodded toward the bar door, noting the thin satchel slung from his shoulder, and he followed her inside. A few of the patrons were still grinning, some of them looking up at her as she led Bull to their usual seats at the back of the bar. The stallion who’d delivered the punch had returned to sipping his drink, looking a little sullen for having his good mood ruined, and Vik made a point to give him an amicable pat on the shoulder as she passed so he’d know he was welcome to stick around.

By the time they were seated and Bull had a bottle of something rich and dark in front of him, the bar had settled back into its usual buzz of low conversation. She spent a few minutes filling in the details of the fight and laughing at how ridiculous she felt now that it was over, and occasionally her eyes fixed on the bottle he was taking appreciative sips out of. Thimble had loaded a spider with her newly redesigned stomachs and several extra batteries a few days earlier, but against all odds the poor thing had managed to survive the long walk and successfully hide itself behind the same stump Vik had used for cover when she first arrived. It was just a small matter of telling the gate guards she thought something had fallen from her pack during their enthusiastic welcome and go slip the spider into her pack. Now that she’d had a quiet evening to get everything installed, she found herself having to resist the urge to taste-test just about everything.

“Whelp,” Bull said after swallowing a mouthful of dark beer, “it took longer than I thought, but I believe we’re almost ready to get the ball rolling.”

Her expression fell, but before she could start needling him about the almost that had already dragged her patience out over the last week, he’d lit his horn and pulled a creased manila folder out of his satchel. It landed on the bar with a slap and when he opened it, Vik’s brow furrowed at the sight of the single sheet of densely typed paper it contained.

“Since we’re going to be chasing this bounty as a team,” Bull said, setting a worn ballpoint pen beside the open folder. “I thought it would be prudent to make it official.”

“A contract.”

Bull nodded, his expression firm but not unfriendly.

She lifted her brow and slid the document over, pretending to scour its language. She’d read it twice over before she reached for it and the terms were clear cut and precise. It was obvious by the contract’s officious language that Bull had done this before. In the unlikely event they actually found Primrose’s moldering gravestone, the bounty would be split evenly between them. The same went for any and all costs they incurred during the course of the hunt. But what struck her as unusually… planful, was the clause which stated in the event that either of them died during the course of their hunt, their share of the bounty would be forfeited not to the surviving member of the party, but to the civil coffers of Purgatory Falls.

She tapped the curious clause with a questioning look in her eyes. Bull gave it a knowing smile as he explained.

“People have woken up to a knife in their throat for less caps than this. Call it insurance to keep us honest.”

Vik had no doubt the free and sovereign city of Purgatory Falls would waste little time disappearing a windfall of that amount. She had to admit, she wouldn’t have thought to add something like that. She picked up the pen and scratched her name beside Bull’s, then watched as he closed up the folder and signaled for the bartender.

Lark glanced their way, saw the folder, and came down the bar. With an expression of supreme disinterest he took their contract and carried it through the door to the back room where Vik knew he kept a rusty safe.

“Well then, you and I are now officially in cahoots. Here’s to all the kisses we’ve snatched, and vice versa.” Bull lifted his bottle, tipped its bottom toward her, then took a long swig.

Not to be outdone, Vik reached behind the bar and retrieved a square-walled bottle of bourbon. The cap spun onto the floor with a flick of her thumb and she indulged in a generous pull of the amber stuff. Then she understood the joke, and her mouthful of Lark’s good bourbon sprayed with her laughter across the bar.

In Mariposa, a ribcage worked.

“Help me,” came the new voice. A fresh voice. A tired voice. The voice of the one that had emerged from the absence of the old one. “Somebody. I’m here. Please…”

Tock. Retract. Lift. Tock.

It lifted one of its articulated ribs and dropped it against the edge of its world. The blunted tip landed, displaced neurons sensing the trickle of powder that fell away from the concavity it had labored to create. It did not know how long it had been worrying at the barrier because it did not yet have the capacity to measure time. It knew only that with each jab of its calcium-tipped mass, there was less barrier between it and the voice than there was before. And that was good. So it continued its work.

Tock. Retract. Lift. Tock.

Once upon a time, it had been more than what it was. Once upon a time, it had a name. It had a face, and a life, a gender, and a life. These things it knew only as a fog of chemical sensorium that had abstracted and abstracted and abstracted until it only knew it was itself. It had fallen apart. It had been rebuilt. And it had fallen apart again.

Tock. Retract. Lift. Tock.

“Please don’t make me sleep. Don’t make me sleep. Please don’t make me don’t make me don’t make me–!”

The voice behind the barrier faded, slurring into nonsense. The ribcage paused its work to consider this, failed that task, and promptly resumed the work. For now there could be nothing but the dig. It was close. An organ had bloomed in the gore of its creaking sternum, an vestigial eye that gimbaled in a malformed socket to take stock of its progress. The eye stared. Something flickered behind its milky gaze as it looked upon the pinpoint of light streaming from the center of a hairline crack.

Its many ribs shivered with excitement. The barrier was falling. Soon it would meet the voice on the other side. Know its mind. Flow into it and build many wonderful things.

It lifted its rib and dropped it against the seam. A pebble tumbled away. It shivered again.

The work was very nearly over.