June 11, 9:30 PM

We have documents from the plague’s original source 89%

Wayfinder did not expect much difficulty with the central aspect of her task, since, of course, her claims were true. Yes, they were the origin of the infection. Yes, they had unique resources that might allow for a vaccine, something no other territory or government had any chance of producing. But whether any remote power would be willing to invest the resources required to help her city—that was much harder. She had to convince them that she had the ability to help.

Her contact didn’t hang up. He listened as she explained what they had—data from their supercomputer, leftover equipment from the base that was at the core of the outbreak, a large number of infected personnel likely still within the city. And importantly, many Equestrian books on magic, medicine, agriculture, and other topics. Such a library could not be physically transported, but scanning and dispersing what it held could provide vital information not offered anywhere else.

“I believe we have the resources to develop a vaccine. And frankly—if a conventional approach was going to be successful, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” she finished, perhaps an hour later, on a conference call with half a dozen NATO representatives, each wearing their respective uniforms. The single American in the room lingered near the back, an old man with a grim face and hollow eyes. He asked no questions, and the others barely seemed to realize he was there.

“But,” said a stout man off to the side, through his German translator. “There is a but. The infected wishes for something for this information. Though vital to the survival of the human species, she is about to make demands. Yes?”

“Yes,” she said, flat and annoyed. She glared at him, not his translator. “I have two million people I must protect. If the human race cannot spare enough to help me keep them alive, then we must direct our attention to survival instead.”

The audio muted. She stared into the laptop, watching as the room’s occupants spoke to each other. She caught a few words on the text display captioning the translation, though the transcription was a garbled mess. Something about Berlin. She glanced briefly out the window of her office, but all was quiet this late in the day. No Sunburst to give her some key insight to make them all do what she wanted. She was on her own, negotiating with powers that weren’t even within their own borders.

They could be considering a raid. Denver’s position in the interior offered some protection, and the one-way nature of the attack had more. But if they thought Denver’s assets were vital to the survival of the human race…

The audio came back, and this time the speaker spoke English, albeit accented in a way she wasn’t used to. A representative from the UK this time. “We need greater precision in your request, Miss… Wayfinder. Supplying you with anything will be a monumental endeavor considering the collapse of the US rail system and distance from any port. Every load we send will need to be transported by aircraft—an exceptionally difficult task given the loss of US support. We could do perhaps more if a rail corridor through El Paso, though we are unable to put boots on the ground to secure this corridor or the landing site.”

What they weren’t doing was asking why this negotiation wasn’t going through federal channels. If it still existed as an operating entity, it was clearly not in any position to stop her. Though they might still have ICBM capability, would they really use those resources against their own citizens just trying to survive?

We’ve been limiting ourselves to a little circle in the desert, hiding from the shadow of a government that isn’t there anymore.

How much of her careful expansion, tiptoeing language, careful obedience to an authority that actively harmed their survival odds. She didn’t have to fear the senator either, though so far Command had been quite accommodating with her ideas. No reason to rock the boat there.

“I wonder if we might make an arrangement that looks like this,” she said, staring into the camera. “I have a list of useful materials I’d like sent to get my research going, and as a gesture of good faith. When they’re dropped over the airport, we’ll send all the data that we have, other than the books. Those will take time and manpower to scan, so we’ll do those in the coming weeks. But the data isn’t what we really have to offer, it’s our resources for developing a vaccine. We have something you will not find anywhere else on the planet.”

She lifted the laptop into the air in her magic, walked with it across her office, with the camera tracking her. With her horn, she teleported one of her binders across the short distance, bringing it into the air beside her head. She didn’t open it, though; they didn’t need to read Sunburst’s grim economic forecast for the city any more than she did.

“You already have the best conventional labs and experts in every related field working on this, I’m sure. But what you don’t have is anyone who understands the force that actually changed people. I am such an expert, and I have others more knowledgeable than myself. If the solution is to use the disease’s own weapons against itself, you will never develop a vaccine against it in Paris or in London. But perhaps we can, or perhaps working together with your experts, we can discover something. I expect—the truth is both. We show it’s possible, you learn how to make enough.”

Less of a delay this time.

“Even if we can, even if you offer us the cure, we can’t supply a city of that size indefinitely,” said the French ambassador, a stern-looking woman. She didn’t use a translator, which surprised Way more than anything else about the whole meeting. “Supplying water would be impossible. Fuel would be impractical. Food—perhaps for a limited time. But transport becomes a limiting factor. A second Berlin Airlift is not possible.”

“I’m not asking for indefinite, or for someone to fill all our needs,” she said. “I have some gaps I would like to see covered. If this works out, I might be able to secure that port on our end, maybe even clear a corridor. We would staff it, unload the shipments ourselves, then freight it here.”

They could do all those things, if she put the expertise together from their survivors and violated at least three restrictions the feds had given them, risking a violent response. But through her laptop, the single US representative didn’t so much as blink at the proposal. He remained silent in his sole chair at the corner of the room.

“Let’s see your list,” said the German, annoyance obvious in his tone. “Perhaps we can agree to an initial exchange. Some cargo, good faith, and we get your data in exchange. After that, we see.”

“We see,” she agreed. Then she set the list in front of her and began the negotiation.

Two weeks later…

Denver’s judicial inmate review took days. Wayfinder could not escape attending every session, despite the number of inmates. She couldn’t possibly avoid it, given it was she who insisted on this radical change.

Weeks more would be required to break the perverse pattern that led to trapping so many of her own citizens behind those concrete walls. A new, simplified legal system Sunburst had helped construct helped, but ultimately the problem was entirely “human.” Once even the officers who joined for the right reasons saw that bringing people in and extorting money to get them out again was the way they fed their families, she had to hike uphill to break that cycle.

The same was true of the many, many prisoners who had no records at all to say why they’d been locked up. The missing records seemed entirely deliberate, on the lines of “who knows if you’re a killer or you didn’t pay a parking ticket.”

Wayfinder released half the prison population on the first day—every person who’d been arrested for a nonviolent offense. Many of those had nowhere to go, no families to notify, and weren’t even healthy enough to walk to the assignment office.

The next day, another few hundred inmates walked out through the doors to join Denver’s general population, those whom officers could identify and explain their crimes.

That still left over two thousand, in conditions that Sunburst described as ‘horrifically unequal’. But some of them were killers, rapists, and robbers, people who had been hardened into greater monsters by the terrible conditions of the prison, rather than reformed. People who would burn their little city to the ground before its foundations could be secured.

It was after an exhausted third day with only a handful of successful releases that little Hazel found her in the hallway, offering her a mug of tea. “Sunburst told me to give you this. Says he’s working late again on the spell. Should be ready next week.”

She took the mug, holding it over her nose and letting the soothing vapor rise into her nostrils. No simple tea leaves in there, or anything earthly she could identify. Did he bring seeds as well as books? But today wasn’t the day for asking questions like that. Wayfinder slumped to her haunches next to an empty vending machine, and drank.

“The judge’s robes look cool,” Hazel said, poking the black fabric. “How come you have to do it? There were already judges in Denver, right?”

“What we… negotiated,” she muttered, lowering the floating cup to watch Hazel’s face. “It wasn’t just about getting a new payment structure—” which will come crashing down on us and destabilize the whole city if we can’t keep the Joint Pandemic Response Command supplying us. “The police union felt strongly that I was misrepresenting the number of innocent parties incarcerated. They wanted me to be personally responsible for every release.”

She levitated a four-inch binder out of her satchel, turning it towards Hazel. On the first day, she’d needed three of these. On the second, two. Now there was only one, and it had scarcely twenty pages. A simple intake list—names, species, sex, apparent age. Nothing about crimes.

“Two thousand people without paperwork, Hazel. Imagine… you have a box of delicious candy, but some of the pieces are poison. You don’t know which. If you don’t take enough out, your friends go hungry. But if you grab even one wrong one, someone gets hurt. What do you do?”

She stuck out her tongue, little wings buzzing in agitation. “Mom, I’m twelve next month, not six.”

Mom.

She didn’t seem to notice she’d said it, and went on in agitation. “I ask the wonderful, super-smart Hazel who can read emotions and knows what kind of person someone is just by talking to them for like ten seconds to help. Easy.”

Not quite that easy. Wayfinder wasn’t stupid either, she had considered asking Hazel. “Sweetie—you have some amazing powers. But people can fool you. Some of the worst people are the best at hiding. The ones who covered themselves in tattoos and scream at me when I ask them why they should be released make it easy. Most don’t. They… they know we’re in a bad situation. They know we need people to be working now, that we can’t afford to dump our very limited resources into housing people who can provide for themselves. So they can act very, very polite. Maybe their family is in the courtroom, maybe they feel real love when they look at them. But that doesn’t mean they won’t hurt someone—” like you, “if they get the chance.”

Hazel scrunched her face for a second, tugging away from her. Her tail flicked, her wings lifted her off the ground, and she floated back and forth, like she was pacing. “I… I… might… they’re gonna be furious if I tell you.”

Wayfinder drained the rest of the mug, then tucked it away in her satchel. “Who is?”

The bug landed in front of her. Gone was the starving, desperate child she’d found clinging to life in that awful house. As she healed, the sunken features were gone, and Hazel’s whole coat seemed to sparkle in the light. She might even have fewer holes in her legs, though Way hadn’t kept track enough to know for sure.

Hazel transformed in a flash of green magic, into a light blue unicorn. Her coat was almost an exact match of Way’s, her mane slightly darker, with darker green layers beneath. To Way’s much more sensitive nose, she even smelled similar. Mom.

“Come with me. If you won’t let me help, maybe they can.”

They didn’t walk straight there, however much she might want to. Sunburst had dinner waiting in their quarters when she arrived, along with several sprawled pages of spell diagrams. He spoke in hushed voices with Hazel while she explained what they were doing, and had nominated himself to come along before Way finished her pasta.

Hazel let him, that was the strangest part of all. Soon it was full dark, and they slipped out onto the streets of Denver.

The air was less clogged with smoke from burning trash, the streets less clogged with tents and shelters from people with nowhere to go. The street market was still there, a maze of lights and voices and overlapping music. They no longer feared seizure and random arrest, though each one now paid taxes. Much less than they were probably owed, but—that wasn’t the problem Wayfinder had come to solve yet. That they were paying at all was a tremendous testament to her success.

Hazel didn’t go to the market. Instead, she stopped them at the entrance to an alley leading towards the municipal water plant, a power substation, and a few other civic buildings. All were staffed only by a handful of security at that hour, maybe a technician or two.

The street wasn’t deserted. A bar near the corner explained some of the traffic, one she hadn’t known was there. But others were moving further. “Where are we going, little bug?”

Hazel had no wings as a unicorn, but from her face, Way could still imagine the sound they would make. She pretended to hate that nickname. She did not. “You’re gonna promise me that if I take you here, you will not tell me to stop spending time with them. I know it’s bad, I know you won’t want me here. But I’m sharing a secret to help you… help the city. You promise me right now.”

Make a promise without a clue of what she was really saying. If Hazel thought it was bad enough to need a commitment like that…

“Do it,” Sunburst said, urgent. “I believe I’ve extrapolated what we’re about to see. It’s the only explanation for extant conditions. If I had time for a more thorough report, I would’ve included it.”

“Who is she seeing?”

Hazel whined. “Waaaaaaaay!”

Sunburst’s expression was already cracking. If she pushed, he would break. But what kind of trust would that show for Hazel?

“I’m very grateful you’re showing me,” she began. “Can you promise me in return that I’m not going to find out you’re doing anything you shouldn’t be? I’m not your mother, but—I do have a younger sister your age. I will not let you do anything I wouldn’t allow for her.”

“Yeah!” she beamed, her shoulders relaxing. She set off again, walking backward up the street in front of them. They were following the same direction of traffic, towards—somewhere. “I’m not doing anything, Way. I’m not starving like they are. The day you found me, I… I stopped feeling hungry all the time. But most of them are grown-ups. They didn’t have a lot of choices about where they got their love.”

Oh no.

Way realized where they were going another block up the road. A loose gathering of mostly stallions lingered in the shadowy sidewalk near a concrete opening. A griffin and an enormous zebra waited at the entrance, occasionally letting someone down the steps. Each time the door opened, bright pink light flashed out from inside, then darkened again.

Hazel didn’t take them that way, though. They continued right past it and the line of ponies, keeping to the shadowy sidewalk on the other side of the street. She took them into an alley, then tapped a few times on a manhole near the entrance in a pattern.

It levitated open, and a voice whispered up from below. “What is the color of desire?” asked the voice.

“Whatever you want it to be,” Hazel answered, matching the volume perfectly.

“Kid?” came the reply. “Why is there fear behind you? And… excitement? You know the rules. No monos in back. We have to keep everyone safe.”

Sunburst poked his head over the hole, waving down at the speaker. “Hello! The, uh… monos are the ones trying to keep the city safe. We aren’t customers, and we won’t report this. Well—I suppose we are trying to hire a few of you, but not in the way those, uh—other customers… actually I think that makes our contract worse since—”

Hazel shoved him back from the opening. “Let us down, Two! My brother will see me. She owes them.”

Way’s ears folded back, and her mind briefly scrambled, like missing a stair on her way for water in the dark. It lasted as long as it took to remember what had happened to her.

Hazel’s older brother, the one who had given her to them to give Hazel a chance at survival. He’d arrived in the isolation zone over a month ago now, though Hazel had been remarkably reticent about him.

“Fine. But you know she hates it when you call her that.”

Way peered over the edge into the opening. It was a sewer all right, though a thin string of fairy lights made the concrete tunnels glow. Stranger was the reflective green sludge blocking off a few of the adjacent tunnels, and dried onto the walls. “Come on down, if you can handle the ladder,” said the speaker. “I’m not floating you down myself. If you’re gonna break the rules, do it on your own.”