Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Connie? It's time to wake up."

Rolling onto her side, Connie pulled her face out of her pillow and cracked one eyelid. The light of a summer morning stabbed her in the pupil, too bright even through her room's closed blinds and drawn curtains. Connie groaned and clapped her palm over her eye, feeling her aching and fuzzy head throb. "Mmgnh?" she groaned in the direction of the doorway. "Whhtihmizit?"

"Good morning," her mother answered. "Though in about an hour, that would be 'good afternoon.' You should get up and eat something."

Not so long ago, the words would have been an instruction, not a suggestion. That tiny change in their dynamic probably said more about Connie's pitifulness than anything else. Connie rolled back onto her face and grumbled, ""Mmnnnodunghry."

The springs in her mattress creaked, and her bed shifted with her mother's weight next to her. A hand gently stroked her long, knotted hair. "I know you're not, but you need to eat anyway. You need to get out of your room." Sounds of delicate sniffing filled a short beat, and then her mother added, "And you also need to take a shower."

"Ayyyygnowwwww…"

A long sigh feathered the back of Connie's head. "I have to leave for my shift soon. Come downstairs and eat something in front of me so I know you got something in your stomach today." A light kiss pressed into Connie's scalp through her hair before her mother's weight creaked off the bed. "Blech. But first: shower."

Footsteps padded out of the room. After a quiet hesitation, the door creaked shut. It wasn't until her mother's footsteps had faded down the stairs that Connie managed to roll off her face and onto her back. The ceiling stared back at her, empty and blank.

Connie knew her parents were worried about her. She knew they had good reason to be worried. It had been eight days since the Battle of Ascension, which was an overly dramatic name for what had amounted to a scuffle between a handful of Gems on an abandoned mountaintop, but since the "Scuffle of Ascension" sounded even goofier, she stuck with the first name. In those eight days, Connie had cried, and raged, and remembered, and had spent sleepless nights plumbing the corners of her own mind for signs of non-Connie thoughts or feelings. But she had found nothing. And after the pain of loss had faded, she felt nothing.

Well, not nothing-nothing, per se. But her emotions had cooled and congealed into a lifeless, colorless blob that hung on her like an anchor. With this invisible blob weighing her down, it felt harder to move or think. She was sleeping more, sometimes for an entire day, only to wake up exhausted.

She didn't want to worry her parents, but she didn't know how to make things better. She didn't know if she could feel better anymore. And that should have worried her too. But it couldn't. The feeling-blob didn't do worry. It only did heavy.

Taking a long, deep breath, Connie choked, and agreed with her mother on at least one point: she needed a shower. She rolled until her feet struck carpet and then shambled toward her bathroom.

While the shower water heated up, Connie peeled out of her pajamas, which smelled almost as bad as she did. Before she had turned thirteen, the idea of becoming a teenager had seemed like a grand transformation of maturity, wisdom, and feminine mystique on the horizon. Now that she had reached it, the reality of it seemed to be mostly sweating.

Cradling her pajama shirt, Connie stared at the cheery yellow star ironed into its pink fabric. Steven never seemed sweaty. Even after a hard training session, he didn't really sweat as much as glow.

The pajama shirt had been one of his numberless everyday shirts, borrowed from his wardrobe and never returned. Beneath her own funk, Connie could still detect a hint of sea spray and powdered sugar that Steven always seemed to smell like. She started to put the shirt in the bathroom's laundry hamper, but then paused, and tossed it onto the counter instead. It still had a little bit of its comforting magic left in it before the next wash. And as fitfully as she'd slept while wearing the shirt, she was afraid of how badly she might sleep without it.

By the time she finished sluicing off her teenage stank, the bathroom was thick with steam. She climbed out of the shower with her towel wrapped around herself and another towel wrapping up her wet, tangled mass of hair. As her hands moved on autopilot, brushing her teeth and rolling on deodorant, she realized that she did feel the tiniest bit lighter. Being clean, feeling clean, made a bigger difference than she'd thought.

Then she found herself holding her blow dryer as she tilted the towel wrapping off her head. The instant it turned on, blasting her face with warm air, she felt her stomach clench and dropped the dryer, jerking back. It clattered to rest on the counter with a steady stream of air belching from its nozzle.

She stared at the hairdryer, its electric whirr filling the room. Even as she fought the impulse, her stare was drawn up to the broad mirror above the sink. She tried not to look, but the fight was hopeless, and she knew it. Her gaze came to rest on the muddied reflection lurking under the thick, runny fog clinging to the mirror. A flash of color peered back at her through the fog, and even though she begged herself not to, she wiped the condensation from the mirror.

In her smeared reflection, Connie saw the square shape of the gemstone beneath her throat, its rounded sides peeking out from the top of her towel wrap. Its deep green color glimmered back at her with the rise and fall of her breathing. When she reached up to grip the stone, she could feel it still firmly rooted to her sternum, its boxy shape resisting her pull.

"I had been working on a farewell gift, but assumed I would have more time. It was almost complete, but now… Well, perhaps you will find it and finish it for me."

Connie stared at the stone, the only remains of Jade. She had spent days tearing apart her room to find whatever gift the Gem had mentioned. She had looked through every file on her computer. And when nothing new had revealed itself, she had been forced to conclude that the gemstone was the only thing left behind. That, and her own body, free of the corruption Jade had taken with her when she had given up her physical form.

Whole and healthy, Connie had been given a second lease on life. Connie had defied all odds, and even her own promises to Jade, and had come through their shared ordeal intact. And Connie couldn't feel more miserable for the accomplishment.

Twisting away from the mirror, Connie jerked the hairdryer's plug from the wall, stilling its warm wind. She dressed and left the bathroom with a tangle of wet hair at her back and the dryer resting in a puddle of her towel on the floor.

Her mother waited for her in the kitchen, already dressed for work and wearing her lab coat. There was a plate of toast with jelly and a bowl of fresh fruit on the table next to a glass of orange juice, all of it for Connie. As Connie sat down, she saw her mother surreptitiously set aside a hairbrush at the sight of her daughter's soggy hair and try to hide a look of worry.

"Thanks, Mom," Connie mumbled. She took a bite of the toast and forced herself to swallow. The bite crawled down her throat like a centipede made of sandpaper.

A little smile crossed her mother's lips. "Much better," she said, and nodded. Then, pretending to remember, she grabbed a brown cardboard box off the countertop, clearly placed there so she could present it as soon as Connie arrived. "Oh, and we got a package this morning too," she said, and slid the box across the table to Connie.

Grateful for an excuse to ignore her breakfast, Connie pulled the box closer. The tape was already broken, so she pulled the top of the box apart. Inside she found two short stacks of paperback books, their covers old-timey and featuring words like Classics and Canon. "Books?" she said.

"We got your summer reading list from the school's website and ordered them from Bookézoid. The minimum requirement was to just read three off the list, but your father and I figured you for an advanced reader." A twinkle lit her eye as she peered down into the box and added, "But I thought I saw something odd at the bottom…"

Connie slid the books apart and saw a sliver of something dark and starry at the very bottom of the box. Finding an edge with her fingers, she pulled it out to reveal a glossy pamphlet. It had a picture of a starfield surrounding a NASA logo, and was headed with two words that made Connie's eyes huge as she read them aloud. "Space Camp?"

When she looked up, her mother had a coy smile waiting for her. "How did that get in there? It must be a mistake," she said, her tone too serious to be genuine.

An old excitement flickered briefly inside of Connie as she stared at the pamphlet. "But you always said I was too young," Connie insisted, hardly daring to believe that her mother wasn't playing a joke on her, as unlikely a thing as her mother pranking anyone might be.

"Well, no matter how much I don't like it, you keep insisting on getting older," her mother said. The tiniest of cracks appeared in her façade, and she admitted, "And your father and I both agree that you can handle a lot more than we ever realized. We think you're mature enough to spend two weeks getting sick in a centrifuge if that's what you really want."

Connie fought to keep her own smile intact. "Thanks, Mom," she heard herself say.

Composure returning, her mother tapped the cardboard box. "But that pamphlet's at the bottom of your reading list, understand? Once you've finished those books, we will all sit down and talk about what happens next."

"That seems perfectly reasonable," Connie said, nodding sagely as she pretended to agree.

Her mother gave her a long, searching look, but then nodded in return. She collected her purse and keys, and then hesitated. Stepping close, she planted a long, lingering kiss in Connie's wet hair. "I love you, Connie. Call me if you need anything. Okay?"

"I will. I love you, Mom." Connie rose and hugged her mother tightly. And she even managed to keep her smile in place until her mother closed the front door from the other side. Once the lock clicked, though, her mouth sagged again.

Releasing a long, stale breath, Connie dropped back into her chair and looked at the pamphlet again. Not that long ago she would have relished the chance to train with real astronauts, to be trusted to spend two whole weeks away from home with no parental supervision. Even before she had met the Gems, Space Camp had been one of her big dreams.

Now, though, any joy from the notion felt like a betrayal. How could she think about playing space explorer after a real space explorer had given up everything for her? The memories of excitement and longing for something so terrestrial now felt like a child's foolish wish.

Shaking away the memories, Connie drew the first book out of the box. If she couldn't escape the childishness of her old dreams or the misery of the present, she could at least bury it all under some school-approved literature. "Frankenstein? Again?" she groused as she read the cover. Then, opening to the copyright page, she brightened. "Ooh, it's the 1818 Edition! Missus Braeburn probably wants to teach the 1831 Edition in class." Since she had already read the later edition, it at least put her ahead of next year's studies.

She flipped to the first page and picked up her orange juice, determined to consume something if only for her mother's sake. But when the glass reached her lips, she paused, setting it aside to frown at the page. As soon as her eyes focused on the words, the text felt immediately familiar to her.

She started back at the first line, but as she tried to read each sentence, a sense of impatience overwhelmed her. She already knew the words. Shaking her head, she flipped to the next set of pages and continued, wondering if the two editions were actually that similar. They must have been, because as soon as her eyes focused, she realized that she already knew these pages too. Every word on the paper was as familiar to her as though she'd written them herself in that very moment.

Had she actually read this version of Frankenstein before instead of the later version? Even if she had, it had been years since she had picked up the book, and as good as Shelley's work was, she didn't remember it leaving such a lasting impression on her before. But as she flipped from page to page, she could hardly focus on the words before she realized that she knew them all by heart.

In little more than a minute, Connie flipped past the final page and close the book. She must have been mistaken about which edition she already owned. "I hope Mom isn't too mad about buying the same book twice," she said, and pushed it aside. Then she selected the next book: Pride and Prejudice, a book she definitely had never read. With a sigh, she cracked the book, resigning herself to getting through the toughest read first so the rest weren't so bad by comparison.

But as soon as her eye focused on the page, she realized that she knew these words too. Connie's frown deepened as she flipped from page to page, confused by her own recognition. The last time she had tried reading Jane Austen, it had been like trapping her brain inside a cage of itchy banality, and so she had sworn the author off. Now, though, as she skimmed through each page, it was as though she had memorized Elizabeth Bennet's high-society tribulations.

She shut the book and closed her eyes, trying to remember what came next. If she had really read Pride and Prejudice before, she would remember how it ended, wouldn't she? But as she strained to remember, she could only recall the events of the book up to the chapter she had just been reading. Everything before that, she could remember perfectly, but what came next was a mystery.

So she opened the book again and continued skimming. And as she moved from page to page, she realized that she did remember what happened. A minute later she closed the book on Elizabeth's and Mister Darcy's happy ending, bored and frustrated with their wishy-washiness, and recalling every single word of it. Had she really read it before and forgotten, only remembering now as she skimmed through it?

Then, with a spark of realization, she quickly drew the next book, a biography of Carl Sagan assigned as optional reading for her science class. She didn't normally read biographies, and knew for a fact that she had never read it before. And yet, as she flipped to each new page, she felt as though she already knew it.

But that wasn't it. Instead, she realized, Connie was reading each page as quickly as she could focus her eyes. Even without consciously examining the words, her mind was absorbing the text instantly upon seeing it. Before her toast had gone cold, Connie finished reading the entire box of books. She could recall every word of every page, and with just a moment's concentration, she could recite it back to herself without looking. She could count how many apostrophes and commas appeared in each book, and compare the number of each per page, per book, or total their numbers together, or compile a ratio of consonants to vowels, or—

She shook her head and backed out of her chair, sending it skidding across the kitchen floor. Staring at the pile of books on the table, she realized that she had just internalized her entire summer reading list in the time it would have taken any other student to finish a chapter. It was an impossible feat…for a human.

Reaching up, Connie touched the stone under her blouse. The first night she had awoken, Jade had read Connie's entire library: two full bookcases with shelves stacked two volumes deep. This new rapid speed-reading of hers seemed similar, though she'd never really been awake for any of the Gem's reading. But what did it mean that she could remember all of the books perfectly? She didn't remember anything else from the morning in that kind of detail. Would that change? Would she start remembering things she had forgotten?

She had blown Steven off his own porch with an accidental wind the night Jade had…left. But nothing had happened since. And she remembered the event like a normal memory, not like a new-book-eidetic memory. But would that change? Would her old memories start crystalizing like the books were now? Would there be room in her brain for all of it? Would she remember being a baby, or being born? Would she remember memories that weren't hers?

A tinkling sound ripped her out of her mental spiral. She looked to the corner of the kitchen and saw the wind chime strung up above the counter swaying in the still air. The three notes of the chime rang in chaotic, atonal succession. A breeze tickled the damp nape of Connie's neck, but the instant she noticed it, the air stilled again and the chimes went silent.

Connie felt her stomach curling up into a shriveled little fist underneath her heart. "Jade?" she whispered. "Jade, are you doing this?"

There were no chimes this time, and no voices in her head, and no new understand of what was happening to her.

She felt her eyes sting, and clenched her eyelids shut. "I could really use you right about now. You kind of left your body stuck in my chest. Can you please come back and help me figure out what's happening?"

Silence answered inside and out.

Her fists balled tightly at her sides, her knuckles cracking. "Please," she said, voice quavering. "Please come back. Please."

Nothing.

"Please!" she shouted into the stillness.

Her voice rattled the room, knocking her breakfast across the tabletop and throwing her orange juice into a puddle on the floor. The empty cardboard box tumbled and smacked into the refrigerator hard enough to crumple its corner. Curtains at the window billowed and snapped like flags, and the wind chime jerked against its hook, its chimes banging into each other and the clapper in a cacophony of noise.

Startled by the sudden windstorm, Connie scrambled backwards out of the room, running from the screaming notes of the wind chime. For just a second, it felt as though she were running against a hurricane gale, but she pushed through it and ran up the stairs and into her room.

The door slammed behind her, and she braced against it, chest heaving. Familiar jitters of adrenaline shivered in her nerve endings. She closed her eyes and forced her breathing to slow, concentrating on the simple physical process. In moments, her heart rate eased, and the pounding in her ears faded.

An odd weight hung in one of her hands. Looking down, she jerked in surprise to find the doorknob to her bedroom hanging broken in her hand, ripped out of its housing in the door. She didn't remember feeling the knob break away, and couldn't imagine how much effort it would have taken to manage the feat on purpose. But the broken ends of the metal were fresh and obvious, and still sharp when she tested it with her thumb.

With her wits returning, she could hear herself think again, and only one thought rang clearly in her mind. "Steven."

Chapter Text

"Those sound like Gem powers!" Steven exclaimed, his excitement ringing tinnily through the phone.

Connie continued flipping through the hardcover omnibus of the Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian Novels. In the time it had taken her to recount the morning's antics to Steven, she had paged through the majority of the book. Now she closed its back cover, and every single word of it remained in her mind with perfect clarity. "Maybe the wind stuff," Connie hedged. "But reading? That seems like a weird power."

She could practically hear him shrugging. "Gem powers can get pretty weird. Remember when we met?"

A smile cracked through Connie's worry. "I remember it a little bit," she teased.

"And that was one of the less crazy times. Wait until you turn into cats. Or a baby! You were around for that one too." His blushing was so deep that it seeped crimson and bright into his voice.

Running her hand across the smooth, glossy letters of the omnibus cover, Connie felt her smile fading. "Jade did say that she read all of my books in one night," she admitted.

"Maybe this is just your gemstone's powers coming in. Like mine came in for me!"

Memories slipped through the lids of her clenched eyes, and she relived the early days of Jade's reawakening. The bodiless Gem had only her winds to herself back then. She had been helpless, voiceless, and when Connie had traded places with her for just a few hours, it had felt like torture. Now even Jade's winds had been taken from her empty stone.

Her hand shook, raking her knuckles across the book cover. "It's not my gemstone," she muttered.

The other end of the call hung silent for a long moment. Connie silently cursed herself for saying that. Steven was trying to help her. The last thing she wanted to do was foist her mountain of guilt onto his shoulders.

Forcing her tone to brighten, she continued, "But maybe you're right. This could just be happening because the gemstone is still inside of me. I'm just worried now about what's going to happen. I mean, if I can blast a wind chime at ten paces, what else can I do?"

Steven's voice came back with even more cheer and confidence. "You just need to practice, like I did! You can get a handle on it when you come over for sword training. There's lots of air up there to blow around! Or, I guess there's air pretty much everywhere, but the only people you could knock off would be me or Pearl. And we'd be okay if we fell."

An imaginary windblown Steven floating to the ground was a pretty cute thought, far cuter than a plummeting Pearl. But then that thought made her think of the explosive nose-blowing on the night after Jade's…on the night after the battle. The next time something like that happened, her parents might be in the line of fire. "Jade used to brag that she could take a building right off its foundation. Am I gonna do that by accident?" she said, as much to herself as to Steven.

"Oh, yeah," Steven said, as if that thought hadn't occurred to him either. "It's too bad you don't live out on a beach. There's plenty of room for big mistakes without anybody getting hurt. That's why my Dad and the Gems built the house on the front of the temple. Stuff gets broken around here all the time, but it's no big deal."

Connie's mouth quirked as she tried to imagine her parents being as blasé about property damage as the Gems were. During their previous cross-country move, her father had hired movers for the furniture, and ended up with a scratch on the antique grandfather clock that had led to a weeklong argument and desperate attempts at do-it-yourself fixes that had led to more arguments and hurt feelings. If Connie accidentally blew out the windows, it would send her whole family, Connie included, into hysterics.

Frankly, everyone would be a lot safer if Connie just stayed somewhere where an accidental gust wouldn't be a tragedy, somewhere like the b—

A sudden realization struck Connie dumb. As the details of the idea took form, she realized that it was accidentally brilliant, solving almost every problem caused by these burgeoning powers all at once. It made perfect sense.

But it also felt unbelievably selfish, and ridiculous, and impossible, and it scared Connie with how much she had wanted it all along without realizing it.

Her ongoing silence made Connie realize that Steven hadn't spoken for nearly a minute either. She checked to make certain that their call hadn't dropped, and then waited to see if he would repeat some question or comment she had missed. But his wordlessness in the phone seemed to vibrate with the same kind of excitement she could feel jittering in her own body. "Steven?" she said. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I think so." He spoke in a hush, but there was a growing excitement straining to burst through the words.

Connie's heart beat faster. "Would…" She swallowed hard. "Would that be okay?" she asked, and then held her breath.

Somehow Connie could feel Steven grinning through the phone even before he shouted his enthusiastic reply directly into her ear.

"Huh. When did this happen?"

Connie watched from the corner of her eye as her father stood on tiptoe to run his thumb against the kitchen wall, feeling at a nigh-imperceptible scratch in the paint behind where the wind chime hung. She couldn't quite stifle her wince as she realized one of the chimes must have struck the wall during her windy incident—windcident?—earlier that day.

Glancing sidelong, Connie caught her mother staring curiously at her, and wondered if she had been busted already. But her mother seemed more concerned with the plateful of untouched dinner Connie was scraping into the garbage can instead. "Not in the mood for stir fry?" her mother asked.

Offering up a weak smile, Connie said, "It tasted great, Mom. I just…had a big lunch."

"Mmm-hmm," her mother hummed noncommittally, and stacked the dinner plates in the sink.

Connie's heart thundered in her ears. She wasn't eager to jump into the night's looming discussion, but anything had to be better than listening to her mother fuss over Connie's lack of appetite again. "Actually, I've kind of had something on my mind. Would it be okay if we had a family meeting?"

Now both of her parents eyed her with mild suspicion. "Family meeting" was the polite term they had always used to announce some unpleasant decision beyond Connie's control. They were the words that proceeded each new relocation, or a doctor's appointment. But this was the first time Connie had turned the phrase back on them. "Okay," her father drawled, and set aside the dirty pans from dinner.

They followed Connie into the living room and settled onto the couch. Beneath their open curiosity, Connie could sense a hint of concern. It was probably warranted, given everything they had been through in the last few months, but it made Connie nervous all the same. Luckily, she had written down her talking points and read them ahead of time, so she wouldn't forget them. Ever.

"First, thanks for coming," Connie said in what she hoped was a mature, adult tone.

"Thank you for hosting the meeting," her father replied, a tiny smile pulling at the edge of his mouth.

Her mother remained all frowns and business. "Connie, is everything alright?"

Connie steadied herself with a deep breath. That was the very question she had been dreading, and the one for which she was most prepared. Bending, she drew out the cardboard box given to her that morning and set it on the coffee table. The box's top was open, and all of her new books were neatly stacked inside it. "I finished all the books," she announced.

Concern turned to parental skepticism in her mother's expression. "Connie," she said, sounding reproachful, "I'm glad you're excited about the possibility of space camp, but we expect you to do the work before we have that discussion. It doesn't count if you skim the books and look up summaries on the internet."

She couldn't have scripted a better setup if she'd tried. Showtime, Connie told herself. Then, with a carefully straight face, she said, "You don't understand. I didn't just read all of these books. I read every book in the house today. And I know all of them."

That got the reaction she'd been looking for. Her mother shed the last of her concern to appear wholly skeptical, while her father perked up, intrigued. "Like, 'all the books,' all the books?" he asked, and looked at the bookshelf at the far end of the room.

She nodded. "Pick a book and tell me the page number," Connie told him.

Her father leaned forward and grinned. She could tell he was expecting some kind of trick or prank. Her mother, though, rose from the couch and went to the bookcase, alternatively searching through its volumes to find a suitable challenge and glancing back at Connie in confusion.

Connie's father was faster on the draw, and had a book from the box opened in front of him. "Show me what you got, Lady Library," he said, and then gave her a page number.

Connie didn't need to think for even a full second before she began to recite: "As he was about to descend, he heard a voice from a distance, hallooing. 'Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!' He looked around, but could see nothing but a crow winging its solitary flight across the mountain." Then she paused, raising her eyebrows in a silent question, asking if she should proceed.

He nodded as he read along with her, then snapped the book shut to reveal an eager face. "Okay, what's the trick? Did you memorize a little bit from each of the books? Use subliminal hints to make me pick this one?"

"Connie," her mother called, commanding the room's attention with her no-nonsense tone. She had one of her old textbooks opened and was looking down to a page Connie couldn't see. "Chapter Nine-Point-Three," she said, pointedly omitting the page number.

So Connie supplied it. "Page two-seventy," she said, and then recited: "Humans have a large surface area over which to exchange gases with their environment. The respiratory system actively moves air in and out, or ventilates, the lungs and then exchanges gases with cells in the blood."

Her mother's eyes grew wider as Connie read. Before Connie could go on, her mother slammed the book shut and stared. Her confusion broke the smile in her husband's face. "Connie, what's going on?" she demanded.

Connie tried to smile and look at ease, even though she felt more nervous than she ever had presenting a report at school. "Something happened today. Something woke up," she said, and touched the gemstone at her collar.

A moment of stunned silence followed the admission. Then, in a small voice, her father asked, "Is Jade back?"

She had been expecting the question. Even still, it landed like a punch to the stomach. "No," Connie murmured, shaking her head. "But I think her powers are. Back, I mean. In me."

Her mother put the textbook back on the shelf. Hand lingering, she touched at the wood. Connie could tell her mother had noticed the dust disturbed in front of each book from when they had been pulled earlier. "This happened today?" her mother asked, and the real question behind it was obvious.

"I promise," Connie insisted, lifting her hands. "Jade was an Archivist in space. It was her job to remember everything. So now I guess I can too. Or at least everything I read. And I can read super-fast. It's actually pretty cool. I mean, I did all my summer homework in a few minutes."

Already Connie could see the wheels turning in her mother's head. There was concern and uncertainty, of course. But Connie knew there was a tiny spark of calculation behind those feelings. Her mother was seeing grade point averages and college applications. Maybe even early acceptances. Prestigious institutions vying for Connie through scholarships and more.

You sold the razzle, Connie told herself, and allowed for a tiny smile. Now sell the dazzle.

Connie retrieved her next prop from under the coffee table, hefting it a few inches over the floor with her whole body. It was a large dumbbell, rusted at its edges and stamped with a prominent number at each end.

Her father stood up for a better look. "Hey, is that one of my old free weights? You know, your old man was pretty buff back in college. I've been meaning to get back into it," he said, and flexed a bicep. "Just gotta find a good time to start."

Folding her arms, her mother quipped, "Yes, it's been a hectic couple of decades."

Connie drowned out their banter and stared down at the dumbbell. She hadn't gotten to practice this part as much as she would have liked. Thinking muscular thoughts, Connie reached down, grasped the dumbbell in one hand, and hoisted it over her head.

The two adults went silent immediately.

The reaction made Connie grin, and she felt her body surge with whatever power let her lift the weight. It was heavier than her sword, and much more cumbersome, but she hefted it without any real effort.

"See?" she said, and held the weight straight out in front of her, and her arm remained utterly motionless. "I can't exactly stop a runaway train, but I'm way stronger now than I was. Sometimes." She swung the weight straight up again and began twisting its ends from side to side above her head. "I kinda found out when I sort of, a little bit, broke my bedroom door—"

Her mother's eyes, already saucer-wide, went bigger still as Connie released two of her fingers from the weight's grip. "Connie, you put that down this instant before you hurt yourself!" the woman snapped.

The commanding tone startled Connie. Suddenly all of the weight rushed back into Connie's arm, which couldn't handle it by half. She yelped and ducked out from under the plummeting dumbbell. Its end clipped the corner of the coffee table on the way to the floor, and a large divot crumbled out of the wood, leaving splintery edges and a dusting of shards on the floor.

Horrified, Connie stared at the crushed tip of the table. Her worst fears about her meeting, or presentation, or whatever she was trying to do stared back at her with ugly splinters. This was the scratched grandfather clock times a million. Now they would never listen to her.

"The Moron's Guide to Home Repair," Connie mumbled to herself, kneeling down to touch at the splinters. "Maintenance is key but for those times when preparation and lacquer won't do, you have to get your hands on some tools. See Table Six-One for essential must-have tools for your home." The page in her mind loomed large, and she wondered if maybe, perhaps, if only she could fix this, that her parents might still listen to her.

"Connie?" her father said.

"Lacquer," Connie continued, and suddenly she was living in a Ficklepedia page. "The term lacquer is used for a number of hard and potentially shiny finishes applied to materials such as wood." Then she tried to shake the page away. She didn't need to know about lacquer, she just needed the right kind from the store.

"Connie," her mother said, sounding upset. Or so Connie thought. It was hard to hear either of her parents for some reason. Was something wrong with her ears?

"The ability to feel an object, hear sounds," said Connie, at once buried in her mother's textbook again, "and maintain balance results from the stimulation of sensory receptors, called mechanoreceptors, located in skin and ears."

Maybe she could buy a new table? And a new doorknob. How much would that cost? She could read a flyer for a local hardware store, and then she would always know, forever. And her parents wouldn't be mad at her anymore, and she could tell them her plan, and they would listen.

"Connie!" Her parents' voices together barely reached her. They sounded afraid. And looking up from the table, Connie could see why.

The living room shook in a tempest. Fierce winds circled around them, tearing at the pictures on the walls and rattling the furniture. The books on the table flipped open and rifled their pages in a cacophony of rattling paper. Her mother and father stood together, squinting against the wind, their hair twisting and clothes fluttering and snapping. Even in the relative calm of the tempest's eye, Connie could feel her hair tug at her, trying to draw her into the storm's current.

Clutching at her temples, Connie tried to will the tempest silent with her mind. "No, no, no!" she cried.

"Connie," her mother shouted above the roar, her stern voice thready with panic. "We're not mad, but we are concerned. We need you to stop all of this right now!"

"I'm trying!" Connie protested. She even scooped at the wind with her hands, as if that would do anything. For all she knew, it would. But it didn't. "I'm sorry!"

Her mother put on her hospital face, the expression Connie knew could send the toughest nurses scurrying for cover. "Connie you stop the wind this instant!" But the expression cracked, and Connie could see her mother's gambit for what it was. She felt as lost and scared as Connie did.

Then her father wrapped his arms around her mother, bracing them both against the wind, and shouted, "Connie, I've had gust about enough of this wind nonsense!"

Connie blinked. Squinting through the storm and noise, she traded looks of confusion with her mother.

Furrowing his brow, her father raised his voice even higher. "Young lady, if you're trying to make a point, you're really blowing it right now!"

She had to be hearing things. The house was about to fall down around them, and he was cracking jokes? Connie wondered if she, or her father, or both of them had gone crazy.

"Did you think we would like all of this wind? Well, we're not big fans!" he hollered above the tempest.

Connie couldn't help it. Despite her fear, and the anger she felt at herself, she started giggling.

In seconds, the wind began to die down. The books, the furniture, and the rattling pictures all settled, and her parents' blown-out hair laid sideways as the air finally calmed around them. Connie felt her own long hair easing back over her shoulders, five times its normal volume but blissfully still.

Her giggling petered out, and Connie leaned against the coffee table, her palm pressing absently at the broken corner. She didn't think the sight of it would set her off again, but she didn't want to take any chances.

Sagging, her father collapsed back into the couch, dragging her mother to his side. He looked relieved, but his face was drawn, and his hand was laced into his wife's, clenched to quell their shaking. "Nothing," he said, "stops a room dead quite like a Dad Joke."

"I am very glad I married you for your looks," her mother intoned tiredly. But she kissed the back of his hand, then dropped their clasped hands back to the couch. Looking to Connie, she said in a cautious tone, "Are you alright?"

Connie shook her head. "I'm sorry," she said in a tiny voice. "I didn't mean to do that."

Her mother and father exchanged a wordless look. Then they slid apart and each held out a hand. Relief flooded through Connie as she practically hurdled the coffee table to sit between them on the couch. The feeling of both of them squished around her on the small couch was already easing the churning sensation in her empty stomach.

"We know you didn't," her mother assured her, and stroked at Connie's windblown hair. "But this is…an issue. I think we need to… We need to…"

A helpless silence tumbled after her faltering words. It seemed to last forever, until her father broke it for a humorless chuckle. "Let's be honest," he said. "We don't know what we need to do. There aren't any books on what to do when your child starts making tornados." He glanced down, only half-kidding as he asked Connie, "There aren't any books on that, right?"

She shook her head. "I checked," she told him.

Her mother sighed and wrapped a possessive arm around Connie, drawing her even closer. "I never liked that table anyway," she said. "The important thing is that we keep everyone safe until we figure this out."

Connie felt a flicker of hope returning. Her careful planning had blown up in her face, but maybe that had worked to her advantage. "Actually," she admitted, "Steven and I have been talking, and we had some thoughts about that…"

Chapter Text

Morning sunlight gleamed in the smooth, clear waters. The weather was warm, but a cool breeze blew in from the ocean to soften the first bite of summer's heat. Part of Connie was overjoyed to be back in Beach City to enjoy the perfect day at the shore. But another part, a larger part, dragged a sense of dread behind her like an anchor in the sand. That her parents were walking behind her made the feeling even more tangible.

As they crossed the beach together toward the house beneath the temple, she could feel her parents staring over her head at the imposing figure jutting out of the cliff face. "Do they actually wash their clothes up there?" her mother asked.

Connie glanced up at the washer and dryer perched high above on one of the temple's hands. Anxiety coiled around her empty stomach, but she kept it out of her voice as she answered, "Oh, sure. But I think Pearl does all the laundry, and there's a warp pad up there anyway, so it's totally safe. Nobody needs to jump up and down from there." Any of the Gems certainly could make the jump if they wanted to, and likely did so all the time, but Connie made sure to leave that part unmentioned.

"Mmn," her mother grunted, still staring up at the shirts and pants fluttering on the drying line high above them. She did not sound assuaged.

Knuckles aching, Connie clenched her fists at her side. The point of their visit was to prove to her parents that the beach house could be, would be, a safe place for Connie to figure out this new whatever-it-was with Jade's gemstone. If they were hesitant to send her to a regimented, heavily regulated place like space camp, they would definitely think twice—thrice!—about letting Connie stay with the Gems. She had to keep her nervousness in check.

That check became harder still to keep when they climbed the steps of the porch to find a colorful banner hung above the door, greeting them with the words, WELCOME NEW CAMPERS!

Scratching his chin, her father stared up at the banner and said, "So, when you said this could be 'like a summer camp,' what exactly did you mean?"

Connie couldn't answer, having no idea herself. A murmuring of soft voices drifted through the screen door, but stopped at the sound of footsteps on the porch. The door opened, and Steven stepped out to greet them. He wore a pink baseball cap marked with a yellow star to match his shirt, and a silver athletics whistle hung from a nylon cord around his neck. A wooden clipboard was tucked under his arm as he extended his free hand to greet Connie's family, shaking each of their hands.

If he was put off by the bewildered looks Connie and her parents were all giving him as they reflexively returned the handshake, his salesman's smile didn't show it. "Welcome! You must be the…" He checked his clipboard, flipping through several blank pages. "—Maheswaran family! And you're the first to arrive! Very punctual. We'll just wait until everyone checks in, and then we can start the tour."

They stared back at him in a moment of confused silence.

Steven checked his clipboard again, and then announced, "Well, it looks like that's everyone. Please follow me, and we'll get started!"

Connie forced a giant smile onto her face as she motioned for her dumbstruck parents to follow Steven, trying to pretend as though she had any idea of what was happening. But even that fantasy shattered as she stepped through the door and entered some bizarre alternative of the house she had been expecting.

The walls and furniture were obscured behind a forest of cardboard cutouts, each one hewn and hastily spray-painted to look like crude, zigzagged pine trees. A tight circle of stones sat in the middle of the floor, with more cardboard wedged inside the circle and painted to resemble a roaring campfire of logs and sticks. Cartoonish cardboard wildlife frolicked motionlessly in the corrugated forest, including a bear wearing a park ranger's hat and a racoon that appeared to be wearing some kind of jet pack.

Peridot stood at the campfire, holding a set of metal tongs with a raw s'more pinched in the tines over cardboard flames. Her triangle of bushy hair had been stuffed into a pink ball cap identical to Steven's, and she wore a matching whistle around her neck. Behind her, Greg Universe lounged on the couch, a half-tuned guitar spitting out notes as he tested its pegs. Pearl sat beside him with her hands folded neatly in her lap and her face a tight grimace that was probably meant to be a smile. And above them in the loft, Amethyst lay upside-down on Steven's bed, a video game beeping and booping on the TV screen while the controller clacked in her hands.

When she saw the new arrivals, Peridot flung the tongs and their contents aside and opened her arms in a broad gesture. "Ah, welcome, Connie Jade and caregivers! You have the honor of being the first visitors to Camp Crystal Gem!"

Camp Crystal Gem? Connie mouthed the name silently at Steven, making her face a question. Steven just smiled and offered her a thumbs-up in reply, which answered nothing, but made her feel the tiniest bit better.

Pearl rose from the couch and began, "When Steven told us about Connie's problems with her g—"

Peridot sidestepped, upstaging Pearl. "The camp is a multi-disciplinary immersive environment for burgeoning human-gem hybrids, designed almost exclusively by me, Peridot. I'm the head camp counselor, a firm-but-fair authority figure who balances whimsy with responsibility, and just wants to see the campers have the same kind of experience she had when she was a larva like them."

"You were never a kid," Amethyst grunted from the loft.

Ignoring the comment, Peridot wrapped an arm around Steven, presenting him to the Maheswarans. "Steven is our co-counselor, and the son of the camp's owner. His too-cool attitude and feigned indifference masks a deep uncertainty about his taking over the family business one day."

Steven's smile cracked and widened. "I'm so conflicted?" he said.

Pearl tried to chime in, but Peridot interrupted her again with the full sum of her body and voice. "And Pearl is the camp cook. She doesn't get any storylines."

Mouth tightening, Pearl said, "Why don't I get you some refreshments?" She spun on her heel and marched into the kitchen, gathering plates and dishes in the huffiest manner she could.

"I'm not sure I understand," Connie's mother drawled as she stared at the cardboard forest surrounding them. "We just thought Connie would be staying with you for a little while. This is…more?"

Connie braced her smile with a deep breath, and then turned to her parents, gesturing to the madness around them. "Oh, I get it!" she said loudly. "The Gems put all this together as a big metaphor for the kind of environment they want to create for me while I stay with them! It's not literally a summer camp, but it's just as safe and reliable as if it actually were. Right?" She hurled the last word at Steven with an unspoken plea beneath it, beaming panic at him with a look she hoped her parents wouldn't see.

Steven mercifully received her message, and started to agree with her. But Peridot upstaged him as well with the speed and certainty of a used car salesperson. "What? No, that's ridiculous. This is one hundred percent a real summer camp, right down to its rustic yet exquisite facility tailor-made for demi-human survival. We have walls, a ceiling, a door that actually closes, running water available in a wide range of temperatures, and active electricity available from nearly any wall! But don't take my word for it. Take it from the camp's founder!"

She clambered over the coffee table and hopped onto the couch to drag Greg into the conversation. The old musician grinned uncomfortably as he waved and said, "Uh, hey! Actually, we're really excited about Connie coming to stay here. And I got a bunch of stuff to make her feel welcome."

Greg reached under the coffee table and drew out a bundle of thick metal rods mashed into some olive-colored canvas. Then he spread the rods and planted their rubber ends on the floor, snapping the canvas taut into a long rectangle.

"Voila!" said Greg. "Presenting the All Cot Up, the pinnacle of mobile sleeping technology. I picked it up years ago at a military surplus store. Four out of five drill sergeants rated it 'too good for those worthless maggots!'"

Forgetting her worry for a moment, Connie ran her hands across the edge of the cot. The canvas felt rough, and its thick seams pinched at her skin. It wobbled at her touch, its rods creaking. This contraption seemed to be a different species entirely from her big, comfy bed back at home, and that made it feel exactly right for the summer Connie had imagined. "It's perfect!" she declared, beaming up at Greg.

His face lit up, and he retrieved a big metal box next, setting it onto the tabletop with a heavy thunk. "And it comes with a matching footlocker. Father Time took care of most of the leftover boot odor, but I'm sure an air freshener will cover up the rest."

As Connie marveled at the adventurer's comforts Greg had gotten her, she heard a note of alarm enter her father's voice behind her. "So both of the kids would sleep in the same room? Together?" he said.

"Well…there's really only the one room," Greg said, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Not accurate," Peridot noted. "And I can vouch for the long-term viability of the bathroom as a private cell. That's where they held me prisoner, and I adapted just fine!"

Greg quickly knelt to put his arm around Steven, tapping the boy's hat bill up to better see his abashed features. "We taught Schtu-ball here from an early age about being a good roommate, seeing as how he had three of them right away. Oh, and he and I just had part two of the 'Birds and Bees' talk to cover anything we missed the first time around. So there are no surprises."

Steven blushed furiously, and he yanked the hat bill back down over his face. Connie might have thought it cute if her own face wasn't blazing with embarrassment.

"How old are you again, Steven?" her father asked.

"Fourteen," Steven squeaked from underneath the hat.

As Connie watched, her father went from being shocked, to scandalized, to slightly impressed, and then to deeply suspicious, all within the span of one second. Thankfully, her mother already seemed beyond the horrors of a perpetual boy-girl sleepover and into broader concerns as she gingerly swiped the interior of the footlocker. Her finger came out of the box with a thick cake of rust at the tip. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of room for Connie or her things," her mother said, a world of unspoken criticism bulging behind the veneer of her civil tone.

"Sure there is!" Connie insisted. "A-And I don't need that much—"

Peridot again thrust herself to the forefront. "Not to worry. We have an adaptive piece of camp equipment that can serve any need imaginable." Then she stamped her foot and bellowed, "Amethyst!"

The stocky Quartz moaned and let her game controller drop to the bed. Her groan persisted as she flumped off the mattress, then off the edge of the loft, landing heavily on the couch. "Don't call me 'equipment,'" she groused.

"Hey, do you want me to build you that burrito machine or not? You promised to help. Now be storage for Connie Jade!" commanded Peridot.

"Burrito machine?" Connie's father said.

With another groan, Amethyst dissolved her body into white light and poured it onto the coffee table, where it solidified and dimmed into the shape of a second footlocker. Her gemstone sat where the lock should have been, and her eyes were unnervingly far apart at either end of the locker's face. The lid clacked as she spoke, revealing big teeth and a wide pink tongue inside. "Put stuff inside me, yo! I promise I won't eat it. Probably."

Even Connie, well inured to Amethyst's varying shapes, was discomfited by this transformation. So she really couldn't blame her parents for backing sharply away from the table and its talking locker. "Amethyst, you don't really have to—" began Connie.

"Connie Jade is right!" Peridot insisted. "Where's the imagination? Where's the grandeur worthy of Camp Crystal Gem? You can do better!"

The wide eyes of the purple footlocker rolled, and then vanished into another white glow. After pouring herself onto the floor, Amethyst stretched upward into a looming six-foot tower, her roundness hardening into sharp corners. New details bulged forth in the shape of curling scrollwork, patterns of white and deep lavender arising to frame a pair of tall rectangular doors. As the last of the light faded, Amethyst solidified into a large, ornate freestanding armoire. The Gem's face sat above the doors as part of an elaborate carving. "Tada!" she sang.

"…I mean," Connie drawled, smiling back at her befuddled parents, "that's better, right?"

"And check it!" Amethyst said. Her eyes grew hooded, her smile vanishing. "Behind my doors lies a magical gateway to a strange, mysterious world where talking animals fight against a tyrannical witch!"

Connie bit her lip, not sure whether to laugh or cry as she watched her parents eyes grow huge. Anxiety wrung her empty stomach like a sponge.

Then Amethyst laughed. "Nah, I'm kidding, you guys! It's just Pearl."

The armoire doors swung outward, revealing a view of the kitchen through the backless, empty Gem-furniture. Pearl stepped gingerly through the armoire with platters of food balanced in her hands. "I made Turkish Delights!" the pale Gem announced.

A tiny breath jetted through Connie's nose as she sagged in relief, watching her parents approach the hors d'oeuvres carefully. She could always count on Pearl's impeccable instincts for hospitality. The Gem was already talking about how seriously she took Steven's food, and how they made sure he ate every day. Comparatively, the tales of Steven's frozen dinner diet was a ray of sunshine into the gloom, even if it did made the color drain out of Connie's mother's face.

Steven sidled up next to Connie as her parents gave the tray of snacks a tepid response. "Hey," he whispered. "How do you think it's going?"

Her empty stomach stress-gargled one reply, while her mouth answered, "Not exactly how I thought it would."

"Sorry," he whispered. "I was talking to the guys about having you here, and I let it slip that it would be kind of like a Gem summer camp. As soon as Peridot heard that, she started offering suggestions, and then it all kind of just…happened."

"It's okay," Connie whispered back. "I'm really glad they like the idea at all." Her stomach growled again, and she clutched at her middle, frowning.

Steven's frown deepened as he watched her. Then he darted a few steps and hopped into the air, floating behind Pearl. He scooped an array of hors d'oeuvres into a bowl he made out of his shirt front, then dropped down and scampered back to Connie. "Well, everything is better with food. And Pearl really went all-out with this stuff. Here!"

She was about to object when Steven tossed a Turkish Delight at her in a high arc. Her warrior instincts took over, and she ducked under the flying delight to catch it on her tongue. A sweet bouquet filled her mouth as she chewed, and she grinned. "Wow!" she said around the mouthful.

"Right?" Steven said, popping a delight in his own mouth. "Here, go long for a cake ball!"

Connie jogged a couple of steps backward and snatched the treat out of the air with her teeth. Giggles bubbled up in her chest as she swallowed and then opened her mouth for Steven to make another toss. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of her father staring at them both from the edge of the conversation with Pearl. He seemed shocked at the sight of the teens and their game.

On reflex, Connie drew her hands together in front of her and stood perfectly straight, ignoring the treat that went sailing over her head. "We'd better not right now," she whispered to Steven, and tried to watch her father's reaction from her periphery.

Her father looked like he was about to say something to her, his brow wrinkling with concern. Or maybe disappointment? But then her mother elbowed him gently, drawing him back into her conversation with Pearl. "Both of us," her mother said, loudly suggesting that her husband pay attention again, "are very grateful that you're willing to open your home to Connie. We're just not sure this is the most conducive place for her to spend her summer. It's more important than ever that she have a chance to start building her college applications, networking with potential contacts that can support her, and creating a foundation of extracurriculars that will help her future path."

"Sword-training does help my future path," Connie snapped without thinking. The heat in her own voice surprised her, and certainly surprised her mother, whose brow furrowed at the tone.

Pearl's mouth flapped in wordlessness, unable to break the argument gathering between Connie's and her mother's scowls. Connie herself wasn't sure what else she could say that she hadn't already said a dozen times to her mother. So she was almost grateful when Peridot interrupted them again. Almost.

"Camp romance!" the engineer blurted.

The non-sequitur proved powerful enough to break the spell, and rescued Connie from having to repeat the same old fight she had inadvertently renewed.

Once again the center of attention, Peridot composed herself, and said, "Naturally, an essential component of the camp experience is the camp romance. No season is complete without it! And whereas other camps need to rely on multiple incomplete romantic options: the jock, the genius, the best friend with the longstanding unspoken crush—"

Standing behind Peridot, Steven tried to stuff himself up into his hat.

"—but Camp Crystal Gem has its own dedicated apex romancer!" Peridot announced.

Pearl raised an eyebrow. "We do?"

"Amethyst!" bellowed Peridot.

The purple armoire sighed, then blurred into white light and condensed herself into a thick, masculine shape. When the light faded, Amethyst became a long-haired hunk wearing tattered jeans and flipflops. The sleeves of her star-branded T-shirt were torn away, revealing thick, strong arms. Her round face featured a familiar, now cleanshaven smile as Amethyst posed and flexed in her new body. "Whassup?" she purred, winking.

Connie recognized the figure from the old album covers and Polaroid pictures Steven had shown her of his dad's rock star past. Amethyst had become a perfect purple copy of a young Mister Universe, complete with long, flowing hair.

"…what a great point, Amethyst," Steven said, breaking the thunderous stunned silence of the room. "Camp Crystal Gem is the best at everything, which includes making things super-awkward. Heh…" He looked to his father for help, but Greg was oblivious, staring down as he cradled his gut forlornly.

The hairs on Connie's neck tingled, and she thought she felt the stirrings of air around her. Another windy meltdown would almost be welcome at this point, if it didn't mean endangering an entire room filled with the people she cared about the most, and Peridot. Before the air could pick up any speed from her despair, though, a voice from outside called to them, "I'm back."

"Thank the stars," Pearl muttered. Then, hastily cutting a smile across her mouth, she announced, "That must be Garnet! Let's everyone forget whatever Amethyst is doing and go see what she has, right now!"

"Please, yes!" Connie hiccupped before Pearl had finished speaking. Their tour group shambled out the front door at Pearl's urging. Amethyst, reading the room—or perhaps Connie's silent screams—changed back into her usual shape along the way.

As her eyes adjusted to sunlight again, Connie found Garnet walking out of the surf. Rivulets of water drizzled out of the fusion's shoulder pads, and her afro sagged wetly as she strode onto dry sand. A rectangular box made of half-rotted planks sat perched on one of her shoulders, kept in balance by a light, bejeweled touch.

With her free hand, Garnet slid a triangular diving mask up from her face, revealing her angular visor underneath as she greeted Connie's parents with a nod. "Mission accomplished," she told Steven, who grinned.

"Steven explained how important it was for Connie to collect scholarships for college," Pearl explained. "And once he clarified that it meant money, and not vessels devoted to research, we knew we could help."

Sniffing, Peridot added, "Though I am prepared to take my Biblioboat schematics to the prototype phase if needed."

"I still like 'The Readership' better for a name," Steven said.

"It's my design, so I get to name it," Peridot hissed.

"So," Pearl said loudly, her rictus smile widening, "presenting the Crystal Gem Scholarship Award For Excellence In Being Connie. Steven came up with the title."

"I wasn't aware Rose Quartzes had special naming powers too," Peridot grumbled exactly loud enough to be heard.

With zero flourish, Garnet dropped the crate and ripped off its rotting top. The wood peeled away in a curl of dripping splinters to reveal a bed of glittering, glistening coins inside the box. Connie felt her heart jump as her eyes widened upon a veritable fortune in rough-hewn coins. Their minting had been faded by centuries of ocean living, but the contents couldn't be mistaken for anything else.

"You got me sunken pirate treasure?" Connie exclaimed, bouncing up and down excitedly. "Ohmygosh, thank you! You guys are the best!"

"Boom. Scholarship," Garnet said, and smiled. Then her expression sobered, and she added, "I don't know how much a college costs, so if that's not enough, I can go get more."

Greg feigned indignation, grinning all the while as he whined, "Hey, you guys never offered me a scholarship!"

"You never asked," Garnet retorted. "And you don't qualify for the Crystal Gem Scholarship Award For Excellence In Being Connie."

"Got me there," agreed Greg. "I probably would have spent it all on chili fries at the student union anyway."

Connie grinned up at her mother and father, ready to make a joke about how they could now spend her existing college fund on that rocket bike she had asked for when she was six years old. But her smile trickled flat when she saw the slackened, wide-eyed, bloodless expressions plastered over her parents' faces. They looked shell-shocked, staring with open mouths at the Gems' wonderful gift. Why weren't they excited? Why weren't they happy? Connie hadn't seen her parents look so lost since…

…since they had all faced down Flint and Milky Quartz in the Kindergarten.

Her parents' silent shock resonated through Connie like a flat note that she was just now hearing, one that undoubtedly had been blaring at her since they had set foot on the beach. Everything—the shapeshifting, the camp pageantry, and now a life-changing amount of money being handed to them—had broken her parents. It was too much at once, and Connie hadn't seen that until after she had helped shove them into the thick of it. Any hope that she might have had of convincing her parents that the beach house would be a calm, safe place for her to get Jade's gemstone under control had been shattered, if it had ever been real at all.

"Nonsense, Garnet," Peridot said imperiously. "Camp Crystal Gem isn't just an immersive environment. It's a submersive environment!" Then she snapped her fingers, and commanded, "Amethyst, become a submarine capable of deep-water exploration that Connie Jade can pilot. And survive in."

Amethyst blinked. "Uh, I can do a helicopter, and I can do a dolphin. Maybe I can mash them up somehow?"

Peridot heaved into her whistle, blasting Connie out of her misery with the shrill noise. "Unacceptable!" the little Gem howled. "If you want that burrito machine, you'd better turn into something that facilitates ocean exploration right now!"

The Quartz scowled. "Fine," she said. Then her scowl vanished into white light. An instant later, Amethyst's body had ballooned outward, transforming into a tremendous purple catapult. Her face had become the bucket, which scooped underneath Peridot's feet with its menacing grin. Then, unleashing a mighty twang, the catapult flung Peridot out to sea. The engineer's scream dwindled, and then vanished into a faint splish near the horizon.

Pearl massaged the bridge of her nose. "Amethyst…" she scolded.

"Oh, don't even start," the catapult groused, and turned back into Amethyst. "She was being a jerk. No burrito machine is worth that much hassle."

Connie wished she could smile at the Gems' banter, but all she could focus on was her parents' stunned faces. Their silence hadn't gone unnoticed, and even Amethyst and Pearl tabled their impending argument to give the two visitors space. As Connie watched them stare dumbly at the soggy crate, she wondered if there was anything left she could say or do that might salvage the day.

But Greg beat her to it, clapping his hands and rubbing them together briskly. "Okay," he announced, "I think that's lunch."

Chapter Text

Sprawled on the couch, Connie succumbed to the groan that had been building inside of her. The sound rattled every part of her body, from her heels hooked over the back of the couch to the ends of her hair brushing at the floor, and seemed to fill every inch of the beach house at once.

"You said it," Amethyst said from the patch of floor where she basked in a sunbeam.

Steven sat right-side up next to Connie on the couch, rubbing his arm. A guilty look dragged at his features. "I'm sorry if it didn't go so great," he said again.

It was the eighth time he had apologized since Greg had herded her shell-shocked parents toward the city for a sit-down lunch. Grown-ups only, the old rock star had told her, answering her worried look with a wink. We'll bring you two back something. And then they'd all trudged up the beach together, leaving Connie behind to decide everything without her.

Pearl sighed as she lugged a stack of cardboard trees toward the door. "I'm sorry, Connie. I'm not sure I was very reassuring to your parents' concerns."

Poised at the door to take inventory of the cardboard Pearl was gathering, Peridot nodded in agreement. The motion threw beads of seawater from the soggy pink ball cap she still insisted on wearing. "I concur. Most of the failure is Pearl's fault," said Peridot, completely missing Pearl's glare. "But I can't help but feel some small responsibility nonetheless. My aspirations for the perfect summer camp overreached my current means to construct it on such short notice. But it's like they say: even Homeworld wasn't built in a day."

Connie pressed her lips together. It would be easy, and probably cathartic, to blame Peridot's enthusiasm for this disaster. But that wasn't the real problem. Nor was the problem Amethyst's shapeshifting, Pearl's snacks, or the life-changing amount of money Garnet had fished out of the ocean. The real problem was that her parents still refused to deal with this part of her life.

"They always do this to me!" The words burst out of Connie, exploding through the tight line of her mouth. She thumped her fists against the upholstery and snarled, "They always promise they'll listen, that I'll get to be part of the decision. Then they go off and do whatever they want on their own." She didn't want to, but she couldn't help looking to Steven and adding, "And now your dad is doing it too!"

"I'm sure my dad just…" Steven trailed off, looking down at his hands in his lap. Then he curled them into fists and thumped the couch as Connie had. "No, you're right. It's not fair! You should be part of the decision."

Kicking her legs, Connie rolled backwards off the couch, landing in a swirl of her own skirt. "I can't just sit back and let them decide this without me," she declared.

Steven leapt after her, pumping his arms. "Then let's do something about it!"

She grinned, feeling his enthusiasm spark her own back to life. "You have a plan?" she asked.

"Yeah." He rubbed at his chin, his brow furrowed. "They're gonna come back from their lunch not only fully nourished, but with lots of reasonable-sounding arguments, saying things like 'child endangerment' or 'twice the daily allotment of sodium.'"

"Boo!" jeered Amethyst.

"But if we know what their reasons will be, we can be prepared," Steven said.

Connie's eyes widened. "That's exactly what they do on my favorite cable family legal dramedy, Lawyer-In-Law. It's called 'opposition research.' Steven, that's brilliant! We can spy on them and take apart their argument before they even make it! Let's do it!"

Whirling to the door, his fist raised in triumph, Steven declared, "Then the time has come to reassemble the Secret Team!"

"No." The word thudded out of Garnet, who leaned in the corner of the room with her arms folded over her chest. She'd been so quiet for so long that Connie had forgotten about her entirely, and jumped at the sound of her voice. "No secret teams."

"Oh." Steven lowered his fist. "Well, can we be regular spies?"

Garnet shrugged one shoulder. "It won't go how you think it will," she warned, her visor glinting.

Ominous portents aside, Connie knew it was still her best chance. "We have to try," she said.

"Anyone else want to help?" asked Steven. "Pearl? Amethyst?"

Pearl shook her head as she hefted a bundle of cardboard trees. There were still a great deal of corrugated forest remaining in the house for her to disassemble. "I need to clean up all of this," she said.

"Here, Pearl. Let me help." Peridot shouldered the thick stack of cardboard from Pearl's arms, and then lugged it to the circle of stones in the middle of the floor. With a heave, she tossed the cardboard trees into the circle, crushing the cardboard flames and logs inside of it. "Maybe one day," the little engineer murmured, holding her hands out to bask in its imaginary heat as her imaginary trees vanished into imaginary smoke.

Pearl blinked owlishly at the pantomime. "Um, Peridot?" she said.

"Do you mind?" Peridot snarled over her shoulder, tears brimming behind her visor. "I'm saying goodbye to my dream, you insensitive clod!"

"Yeah, I'm good here too," Amethyst said, her cheek pressed to the floor as she idly slid across the room. She happened upon a pair of broken crackers next to a marshmallow, some chocolate, and a set of tongs. "Oh, sweet! Floor S'mores!" Her tongue lashed out and drew the entire lot into her mouth. The tongs crunched loudly while she chewed.

"Keeping the team small will probably be stealthier anyway," Connie said. "Okay, Steven. It's your plan. Where do we start?"

"Dad will want to impress your parents, so he'll take them to the nicest restaurant in town," Steven mused aloud, his eyes narrowing in thought.

After nearly a minute of Steven's uninterrupted knocking, the door opened, and Jenny Pizza peered down at the two expectant spies. "Steven? And you're…Connie, right? Pineapple anchovies? What are you two doing back here?" the pretty teen asked, opening the back door of Fish Stew Pizza wider.

Steven stood with Connie, pressed close to the building to use the restaurant's dumpster as cover from all the prying eyes that they hadn't seen on their way to the restaurant. "Jenny, is my Dad in there?"

"Yeah, he sat down with some other couple and ordered already," said Jenny. Her gaze lingered on Connie, and realization sparked in her eyes.

"Great! We're here on super-serious business," Steven announced.

The Pizza twin cocked a fist on her hip. "C'mon, Steven. Your 'pizza inspector' gag was funny the first six times, but Daddy said we're not allowed to give you any more free slices."

Even the thought of food made Connie's stomach rattle. She shook her head and insisted, "We're not here for that, I promise. We need to spy on my parents and Mister Universe while they come up with reasons to keep me at home this summer because they're worried about me even though I'm worried about bringing the house down on top of them because I don't know what I'm doing!"

Jenny blinked and tilted her head. "Mm'kay, I missed most of that, but I'm getting a general vibe of teenage rebellion here. Yeah?" When Connie and Steven nodded emphatically, she stepped back and motioned for them to follow her. "Cool. Stay low and don't touch anything edible. We still got a health code rating to maintain."

Steven quickly wiped the grin off his face, looking stern as he turned to Connie and intoned, "We're in."

Crouching, Connie slunk after Steven, following Jenny through the too-tiny kitchen of the restaurant. Kiki was switching pies in the wall of pizza ovens, and gave them all a quizzical look, but said nothing when Jenny offered her a thumbs-up as explanation. Connie wondered if it was some kind of silent sibling communication, a twintuition, or if they had simply snuck any number of people into the kitchen before.

At Jenny's unspoken direction, Connie and Steven took up positions behind a shelf of dry goods that blocked them from view of the front of the restaurant. By standing on tiptoe and carefully, gingerly separating a pair of large cans of industrial-grade tomato paste, Connie was able to peer over the front counter, past the register, to the checkered tables of the dining area. A stray glance made her accidentally and permanently memorize the ingredients of that tomato paste, which gave her even less of an appetite than before.

Straining all of the nascent spycraft she had gleaned from television and movies, Connie was able to locate their targets, who happened to be seated at the one occupied table in the entire restaurant. Greg sat with his back to the kitchen, his expression a mystery but his voice loud and clear. "—the best pizza from here to Empire City!"

Filling out the rest of the table, Connie's parents were in clear view. Her mother sipped reluctantly at a glass of cloudy water as she raised an eyebrow at Greg. "Better than Original Famous Original Ray's?" she said, sounding unconvinced.

Greg lifted his hands and laughed. "Hey, I said 'to' Empire City, not 'in' Empire City. But you didn't hear that from me. The staff here can get pretty vindictive," he said loudly enough for the entire kitchen to hear him.

Jenny and Kiki offered perfunctory glares from the kitchen. Connie watched her parents offer equally perfunctory smiles, but she recognized the worry hidden behind the expressions. Already she could see the shape of the argument they would levy against her in the fight to come. It lit an anger inside of her, seeing them ready to conspire against her, but she tamped down on the flames. She had to remain objective, and dispassionate, and logical. Any signs of a tantrum would be grounds for them to disqualify anything she said.

Evidently Greg could see what Connie saw, because his posture eased back in his chair. He let the uncomfortable silence simmer as Jenny ran a steaming pizza out to the table. Once the twin had retreated back to the kitchen, the old rocker dished out slices for his guests first.

"You know," Greg said, dishing out his own slices last, "all that stuff you saw today, that's not even close to what it's normally like. The Gems just have a natural flair for putting on a show. I think they got a little too excited, that's all."

"They definitely seem excitable." Connie watched her father collect a fork and knife for his pizza, and she cringed in secret as he began to cut a slice into bite sizes.

Her mother, at least, had the decency to eat the pizza with her hands. "I have to warn you, Greg," she said, poised at her slice's tip, "if you're looking to wine and dine us, I have some experience with that tactic. Pharma companies try it all the time. Granted, they never thought to try pizza." She took a bite, and after a few thoughtful chews, she nodded in satisfaction.

Greg chuckled, and pulled at his slice, drawing a long string of mozzarella back to his plate. "I was never much of a salesman anyway. You can ask the boxes and boxes of Mister Universe merch I still have if you don't believe me." His head tilted, and an apologetic note entered his voice as he added, "And to be honest, I don't really need to make any sales pitch here. Connie needs help, and the Gems are the one to give it to her."

The stunned silence from Connie's parents boomed, swallowing the ambient noise of the restaurant.

Lifting his hands, Greg said quickly, "Hey, sorry. That sounded way less harsh in my head. Like I said, I'm bad at this. But…the fact is, Connie has a Gem inside of her, and there's only one bunch I know to go to for something like that."

Connie's father set his knife and fork aside. His face hardened in a way Connie had rarely seen. "When you put it like that, it sounds pretty grim," he admitted.

"It's not like that at all!" Greg said quickly. "The Gems think the world of Connie. We all do! And we want to do whatever we can to help her get a handle on her new situation."

A heavy look passed between Connie's parents. Then, in a quiet voice, her mother said, "We haven't completely given up hope that the gemstone can be removed. And now, with Jade…gone…"

Connie felt her eyes burn. Looking down, she found her hand at her chest, her fingers curled around the square stone under her dress. Steven gave her a look of concern, but she tightened her mouth and shook her head.

"Well, the Gems might be able to help with that too. Whatever you decide, we'll all be there to help you and Connie through this. And even if you don't think Connie should stay here, that's okay. Look how far she's come just from visiting on weekends. Pearl says she's a natural with that sword!"

The shelf in front of Connie began to tremble. As her palms began to ache, she realized that she was clutching the metal shelving, her skin blanching at the hard, sharp edges. She was more than furious, barely able to keep herself from leaping across the counter and exploding at the table of grown-ups. Her parents were acting exactly as she feared, exactly as they had promised they wouldn't: they were making decisions for her, without her. And now Greg was chiming in with the same tune. She could feel her grip on herself slipping as her whole body coiled to act.

"But…" Greg continued.

Connie's breath caught in her throat, and she froze.

Twisting a napkin in his hands, Greg looked down and said, "Gem stuff is messy. Like, 'rebuilding your house' messy, even when there isn't something stirring up trouble. Which, from what Steven tells me, there is. That's why the Gems live so far away from everyone else. Well, one of the reasons."

Her father tapped his fork against his plate nervously, eyes distant with memory. "We already had a bit of an incident," he admitted.

Windcident, Connie corrected him in silence.

"Those will happen," Greg agreed, nodding. "They should happen. It means she's figuring it all out. But that's gonna happen again, and if Steven's any indication, it could take a long time before Connie has a good handle on what she can do. Being somewhere where she doesn't have to be afraid of hurting anyone or anything can help a lot with that."

"Connie would never…" her mother started to snap, but then bit down on her words. Deep creases lined her forehead as her gaze fell, her eyes flickering in thought.

"To be honest, though, it's not safety or elbow room that I'm thinking about. And I'm sorry if I'm stepping over the line for saying so, but…" Greg paused, and sighed. "I think kids need space to figure out the big stuff. I needed it for my music. Steven needed it for his Gem stuff. Maybe Connie needs that too. Because nobody else can figure this out for her. Not the Gems. Not us. Not Steven, either, and he's been there. Or at least some version of 'there.' That's why I think some time away could be really good for her."

It was a long, silent moment before her father said, "I think so too."

Her mother's eyes snapped back into focus, widening in horror at his words. Panic threaded her tone as she said, "Doug, no! You cannot make me the bad guy this time. Not for this."

Connie rocked backwards in shock, and watched her father doing the same. "Priyanka!" he started.

But her mother shook her head, cutting him off. Panic consumed any remaining authority in her tone. "You know how much this means to her. After the attack, after Jade… I can't be the bad guy! It isn't fair, Doug!" Her palms slapped the tabletop, making the plates jump.

Her father cupped his hand over her mother's. "Hey," he said quietly, and squeezed. "Hey, that isn't going to happen. We're together on this: if both of us don't agree, then it doesn't happen, and we both tell her."

None of the tension left her mother's body, but her eyes lost some of their wild, white panic.

Squeezing again, he continued, "Priyanka, she was eating back there. She was laughing."

"I…didn't notice that," her mother said in a small voice. "But Connie is going to need structure, and direction, and…"

"Love of my life," her father murmured, using a featherlight voice Connie had only ever heard from him a handful of times, "you are the smartest person I have ever met. But our daughter summoned a tornado in our living room. We have no idea what she needs right now."

Her mother's mouth hardened into a thin line.

"Maybe that stone in her falls off tomorrow. Maybe she becomes a wind goddess who conquers the world with storm and sword. Maybe she becomes a doctor who runs a lucrative kite rental business on the weekend." Her father smiled gently, leaning closer to his wife. "Right now, Connie misses Jade, and she's hurting. So maybe she just needs some time away on a beach to have fun with her best friend." His smile straining, he added, "Even if that best friend has a worrying lack of spare bedrooms available for her."

A snorting laugh cracked her mother's façade. She looked away, pretending to be annoyed so she could hide her smile, like she always did. The familiar tic turned her face toward where Connie was hidden, and Connie went completely still. Tears glistened in her mother's eyes, refusing to fall, but real all the same.

"You're right," her mother said, pretending to massage her eyelids so she could dry them in secret. "Of course you're right. I just… I thought we would have more time before all of 'this' became her life. I didn't think… I didn't think she'd be gone so soon."

Greg, who had been trying to somehow eat pizza and not exist near the conversation, gave up on doing both, and set his plate aside. "I don't know if this will help—probably the opposite—but it's okay to not be okay with it." His rough red knuckles worried against the tablecloth as his head tilted down. "Steven needed the Gems too. He needed that space and closeness with them. But letting him go to live with them is the hardest thing I've ever done. It's still hard some days, even with him just down the street. And knowing it was right doesn't stop me from missing the way it used to be."

A sniffle beside her made Connie glance at Steven. His hand covered his mouth, and tears streamed from his eyes.

"And hey," Greg continued, brightening, "none of this is set in stone. It's just for the summer, and if you don't think it's working out…"

Her mother nodded. "Thank you, Greg. That actually does make me feel better."

But she didn't look like she felt better to Connie. She looked like she was on the verge of tears, and clung to her husband's hand lest the edge overtake her. Connie stared through the canned marinara at her mother's glistening eyes. Her chest tightened as she tried to reconcile what she was seeing of the most unyielding, most stubborn person she had ever known looking frightened at the idea of Connie leaving. How could her mother be afraid of Connie's disappointment? Of being the bad guy? Mothers were supposed to say no to everything. Mothers reveled in the power to say no! At least, that's how it had always seemed to Connie.

Maybe saying no wasn't as fun as her mother had always made it look. But it didn't make her a bad guy. Her mother had to know that. Didn't she?

Stray hairs drifted across Connie's face. She smelled a melody of fresh pizza in the warm breeze, and saw Steven's curly nest of hair buffeting atop his head as he cried silent tears.

Kiki had to slap her hand onto a stack of napkins to keep them from sweeping away in the sudden draft. "Jenny!" she snapped, "You can't keep leaving the back door open!"

Jenny motioned to the back door, which was still closed, and then answered her sister with a rude gesture. Guiltily, Connie bit down on her lip and closed her eyes. She summoned a litany of her father's worst jokes from memory and concentrated on their terribleness until the wind died down again.

By the time Connie had subdued the breeze, Steven had dried his eyes, and their parents had settled the table, letting Jenny box most of the pizza for them to take. While Connie's parents left to wait outside, Greg took the box to the counter to settle the bill he had gently wrestled away from the Maheswarans. He'd only won the battle after promising to let them treat him after they'd found enough historical collectors and museums to help them convert Connie's scholarship booty into a more modern currency.

Connie and Steven both stood perfectly still in their hiding spots as Greg paid. "And the calzones?" Greg asked, laying a handful of bills on the counter.

Jenny added two cardboard packages on top of the pizza box as Kiki collected the cash. "One Supreme, and one pepperoni with mushrooms, hot and ready," the twin promised.

Greg grinned and added a pair of twenties to the counter separate from the bill. Neither teen was shy about taking the proffered tip. "You two saving for anything good?"

"College," Kiki answered.

"Guitar strings," Jenny answered.

He nodded to both. As the old rocker collected his food, Connie allowed herself the tiniest sigh in relief.

Then he stopped and added to the twins, "I'm going to take these two the long way around the block, give them time to decompress from all of that. Please tell the kids they can still beat us home, but they'll have to run if they don't want to get spotted."

Connie's sigh turned into a hiccup.

Jenny didn't miss a beat, blinking in confusion at him. "Sorry, who are you talking about?" she asked.

Greg grinned and winked. "Good for you. Don't trust anyone over thirty." Then, boxes in hand, he left to join the other parents. True to his word, he led them in the wrong direction across the window, taking the Maheswarans further down the boardwalk.

Connie stared through the shelf, watching them go. In a minute, she and Steven would need to leave through the back. They would sprint down the beach to avoid being seen, and would have to pretend to be delighted and surprised by the adults' decision, and she would force down a calzone with her favorite ingredients just to make sure her parents worried a little less about her.

But for now, for just one moment, Connie let her heart ache at the melancholy she saw through the window in her mother's features. Of all the reasons for her to say no, Connie never thought that the one reason to come closest to winning would be that her mother would miss her over the summer.

And now that she realized how much she would miss her parents as well, she nearly wished they had won. Not quite, but almost.

Chapter Text

"So…I guess that's everything," Connie heard her mother say.

Standing on the deck of the beach house, Connie stared down at her entire life distilled into a pair of duffel bags sitting between her parents' feet. Behind them, the family sedan sat parked on the beach, its rear axel scrunched low on its suspension thanks to the crate of old coins tucked in the trunk. Her mother's voice betrayed a surprise that Connie could feel tingling in her own stomach too.

The day before, with its faux camp and awful spy fiasco, somehow felt as though it had happened a lifetime ago. But the time since had flashed past them all at ludicrous speed. An awkward car ride home, and awkward final family dinner, an awkwardly tense family meeting in Connie's room to decide what she would need and wear for the rest of the summer, and a night of staring at the ceiling above her bed had all passed in the blink of an eye. Now it was morning again, and already time to say goodbye.

Connie shook away the dramatic notions and forced a smile for her parents. Steven and the Gems stood behind her, all hopefully smiling for real. "Yup!" Connie said, sounding casual even as the sound of her own heartbeat pounded in her ears.

"Are you sure you packed your—" Her mother started to bend toward the bags as if to open them and reinspect their contents for a fourth time. Connie saw her father stop the motion with a light touch to her mother's arm. Flustered, her mother straightened, grimacing at the color in her cheeks. "Right. Then we'll talk to you tonight?"

"Every night before bed," Connie said, reciting her promise. "Unless I'm on a mission where there aren't any cell towers. But I'll text you before and after every mission."

"Good," her mother said, clearly feeling anything but.

Her father rescued them from the uncomfortable silence. "Connie," he said sternly, "what are you going to be?"

Connie straightened, folding her hands in front of her. "I will be a good student who is mindful of her teachers but not afraid to ask questions," she said.

It was hard for her to keep a straight face. Her father seemed to have similar problems as his cheek twitched. "And what are you going to do?" he continued, still stern, but only just.

The twinkle in his eye broker her, and she grinned. "Kick a socially responsible amount of butt," she promised him.

His arms spread wide as he said, "Darn tootin'."

Connie leapt into his hug, burying her face in his shirt as she squeezed him as tightly as she could. The smell of his aftershave and his light sweat from the warm summer morning etched itself into her memory, wrapped tightly around the feeling of his strong arms lifting her up from the deck, and the tickle of his breath on her scalp, and the way his heartbeat raced against her ear pressed to his chest. Of all the memories Jade's gemstone could make permanent, she hoped that this could be one of them. "Love you, Dad," she murmured.

"Love you," he whispered into her hair. They both pretended that his voice was thick and rough from the force of her hug.

When Connie finally pulled away, she found her mother waiting half a step away, fidgeting. Those calm, clever, strong doctorly hands that had once orchestrated every detail of Connie's life now wrung themselves uncertainly, as though her mother had no idea of what to do with them. "If you…" her mother began, but stopped herself, closing her eyes in a sharp, silent curse. Then she started again, softer still, "I hope you…I mean, I want you to…"

Connie crashed into her mother, wrapping her in an embrace that made her arms ache. "I love you so much, Mom," she said fiercely.

A shudder ran through the fearsome woman, who held Connie tightly and pressed a kiss into the top of her head. "I love you," her mother croaked, sounding as though one more word would shatter her.

And with that, Connie knew she didn't need Jade's gemstone to immortalize the moment. No power could possibly make her forget the feeling, the scent, the warmth, of her mother's embrace. It would stay with her, always.

Wiping at his face, Connie's father looked to Amethyst, and said, "I gotta know: what on Earth is a burrito machine?"

Amethyst started to answer, but then stopped. Her brow furrowed and her bright eyes danced in thought for a moment, and then she said, "You know, I never asked. Peridot just offered it up to sweeten the deal, and I didn't even think about it. I just said yes."

Nodding, he said, "I probably would have too."

There were more awkward words, and worried looks, and long walks to a car that was parked at the bottom of the stairs. Then came the rumbling of an engine, the belch of exhaust, tires grinding against sand, straining under the weight of pirate booty. Through it all, Connie kept smiling and waving. She didn't stop until the last glimpse of that sedan as it disappeared around the far side of the cliff.

Connie thought her heart would ease once the long goodbye was finally over. Instead, it felt like the sanguine drumbeat inside of her would shake her apart. She didn't know what was wrong, or how she felt. Afraid? Excited?

Unmoored.

Her campaign to spend her summer at the beach house hadn't felt real even throughout all the packing the night before. The anticipation had been giddy, dreamlike. But the dream was reality now. And for the first time in her life, Connie's parents had left her somewhere with no immediate plan to come get her later. Connie's life was hers now, completely free. Terrifyingly free.

Before the sound of her own heartbeat could deafen her, and before the winds stirring around her could gather in earnest, she felt Steven slip his hand into hers. An instant later, Pearl's hand rested atop Connie's shoulder. The simple touches were enough to keep her from feeling as though she might float away.

Connie threaded her fingers with Steven's and squeezed. She rested her other hand atop Pearl's as she stared at the empty cliffside. She was untethered now, perhaps even moderately unsupervised, at least compared to life before. But she wasn't unmoored. She wasn't alone.

After a sufficient period of hand-holding and staring at the ocean to quell any panic attacks, Connie followed Steven into the house to settle into her new circumstances. A Quartz and a gentleman both, Steven had no problem hefting her bags for her. Pearl remained outside, intent on making one last sweep of the temple's exterior. She had been finding more cardboard animals left over from Peridot's camp, and wanted to make sure the corrugated species went extinct.

Connie might have walked into that house a hundred times before, but this time felt different. I live here now, she thought. Her eyes trialed across the kitchen and furniture that were all familiar, but still not hers. I live here now, her mind wailed in animal panic, the same way it used to when she had been a child entering some new house thousands of miles away from her old house after yet another cross-country relocation.

Then her eyes found the warp pad and the temple door at the back, mysterious and alien still, but also now hers in some small way. I live here now!

Steven kicked his sandals off with expert marksmanship, slapping them against the far corner of the couch as he settled Connie's bags onto the coffee table. "Welcome home!" he sang, and shoved aside a basket of clean laundry on the couch so he could sit.

Hearing the word aloud triggered a world of reactions inside Connie. Her grin spread wider, and without realizing it she shucked her shoes and stowed them by the door, perfectly parallel. Then she skipped on bare feet to the coffee table to work at the zippers of her overstuffed luggage.

"It's probably too late to say this, but are you sure you won't get sick of me?" She meant for the question to sound teasing, but the silence that followed it gave her pause. "Steven?"

When she looked up at him, she found him staring toward the door, his brow crinkling. Then he caught her glance and smiled. "No way! This is going to be an amazing summer." He retrieved the old foot locker his dad had left her and heaved it to the tabletop.

Relieved, Connie began unloading her clothes bag into the locker. The rust caking it had been scrubbed away, probably by Pearl, and it was now pristine. "I think so too." Her hand paused to trace the square stone's edge through her shirt. "There's so much I have to learn about Jade's Gem…"

"And there's breakfasts at The Big Donut," Steven added, bending to collect his sandals, "and the sandcastle contest next month, and Beach-A-Palooza after that…" He wandered to the door and neatly arranged his sandals next to Connie's shoes, nudging them until they looked properly aligned.

Connie took the opportunity with Steven being across the room to scoop out her underwear from the bag in one overstuffed motion and cram it all under a stack of jeans. By the time he came back, all of her more embarrassing necessities were hidden away. "And we have to track down Pyrite, and Flint, and Milky, and figure out what Shard wants on Earth," she added.

He pulled over the basket of laundry he had shoved aside and began folding his clothes at the opposite end of the coffee table. Connie couldn't help but notice that he kept his own underwear hidden at the bottom of the basket, wadded up and almost out of sight. "Right. Garnet said they were looking for something. I'm guessing it'll be better if we find it first, whatever it is."

Her clothes stowed, Connie started on the second bag, removing her violin case, a few packets of folding paper, and the tight bundle of her training clothes she'd kept separate from the rest of her wardrobe. Last of all, she took out a stack of books, which she handled oh-so-carefully to keep herself from accidentally reading the covers as she stuffed them next to her underwear in the locker. Then she stood with her hands on the locker's edge, staring down at her life, formerly in bags, now in a box. "I'm not even sure where to start," Connie admitted to Steven.

The last of his shorts became a neatly folded rectangle, which he added to the stacked and organized basket of laundry. Brushing his hands clean, Steven shrugged and said, "Lunch?"

As Connie smiled and followed him into the kitchen, Pearl came through the front door, humming to herself in satisfaction. A soggy cardboard owl wearing a mortarboard and holding a cardboard lollipop was tucked under her arm. Walking to the tempo of her aimless song, Pearl wandered to the far corner of the couch and stooped. When her hand met bare floor, she stopped humming, and frowned at the empty spot on the hardwood. Her eyes trailed back to the pairs of shoes at the door, and then over to the basket of neatly folded laundry on the couch.

Head tilting at the basket, Pearl's frown deepened with puzzlement.

The remains of lunch grew cold on the plate in front of Connie. Per the chef's recommendation, she had selected the artisanal chicken fingers accompanied by oven-baked fries and served with a reduction of New England Catsup. She wasn't sure if it counted as a reduction just because she used less of it, but the food still tasted fine, and more of the meal ended up inside of her than in front of her, so she considered it a win. Her chef, glad to reduce the remaining total of ketchup, was cleaning his plate with his last fry.

Conversation had been spare during the meal, and Steven had done most of the talking, suggesting all of the things they might do in the coming days and weeks and months. Connie was having trouble keeping it all straight, and mostly just nodded at each new fun thing Steven could imagine. Eventually, he seemed to pick up on how overwhelming it must have been, and swirled his last fry through ketchup in silence.

Then Steven gasped, and cried, "A li—"

He croaked, clutching at his throat, and his face turned bright red. Connie scrambled off her stool and pounded on his back with a flat hand until he coughed up a half-chewed red fry back onto his plate. "Are you okay?" she asked, and rubbed at his shoulder.

Once the air was back in him, Steven wheezed, "A list!" He abandoned his plate at the counter to collect a notepad and pen. "If you don't know where to start, we should make a list of everything you want to do this summer. Then we can figure out where to start and how to do it!"

Connie brightened. "That's a great idea," she said. But her face dimmed as she recalled what happened when she had accidentally looked at the back of the ketchup bottle. Tomato concentrate. Sugar. Vinegar. Salt. Less than two percent organic spices. "Um, could you write it down for me?" she asked as she gathered her dishes.

"Sure!" Steven said, and stood poised with pen at paper.

The beach house had no dishwasher, but Pearl kept one of those sponge wands with the soap in the handle next to the sink. Connie's eye drifted across the embossed logo on the wand handle—Magic Sponge—and her mind flashed back to every cleaning commercial she had seen over the past few days, which was collectively much more than she would have guessed. Shaking the flashback away, Connie began to wash her dishes, and said, "Top of the list: I want to be able to read or watch something without my brain vomiting up a playlist of everything connected to what I'm seeing."

Steven tapped the pen on the pad. His tongue poked through his teeth as he concentrated. "We should come up with a name for it. Right? I mean, I guess 'reading power' works, but it feels like it's lacking pizazz."

As she scrubbed her plate, watching greasy soap bubbles trail after the wand, Connie thought about how quickly she'd zoomed through her reading list, and how this new ability reserved all of her brain space any time she didn't think about it, and about the awesome cleaning power of Magic Sponge, The Sponge That Makes Dirt Vanish, though that last was involuntary. "Booking," she decided.

"Oh, that's good. Wha—" Steven looked up as he finished writing, and his words stumbled. Hurriedly he collected his own dishes and brought them to the sink, and then found a dish towel so he could dry as Connie washed. "What else?"

She sighed, and the breath sent a plume of soap bubbles wafting out of the sink. The tiny bubbles drifted in front of her, swirling in the gentle puff of her breathing. "I have to get a handle on any more 'windcidents.' Can't go around huffing and puffing people's houses down by accident."

"Okay. What else?" Steven said coaxingly.

Connie shrugged. "I mean, that's all I really need, isn't it? At least as far as power stuff goes. I want to be able to not accidentally destroy stuff just by being around."

His face tightened, and he looked down past his hands toward the hem of his shirt. "It's not just about not destroying stuff, though, right? I mean, that part is pretty important, and honestly it's still kind of hard for the other Gems, now that I think about it. But you should also focus on all the stuff you want to learn to do now that you have a gemstone too."

Connie felt her whole body tighten around the square stone in her chest. She knew what Steven was saying, and she knew he meant well. But that didn't change the truth.

"It's not my gemstone, Steven," she said quietly. As much as she might want to harness the powers of Jade's stone to become the kind of heroic legend she had always dreamed of being, to be the sword-wielding storm goddess her father had joked about the day before, she didn't feel right to want such a thing, or even imagine it happening. Jade hadn't sacrificed herself so Connie could play superhero.

Steven winced, and mumbled, "Sorry."

A pang of guilt made her body coil harder around the stone at his apology. "It's okay, Steven. But the plan before was to remove the stone from my body. Maybe that should still be the goal." She felt sick saying it, but the rational part of her knew it was still true.

"Well…" Steven wiped hard at a dish until his towel squeaked on dry ceramic, his eyes cast down at his hands. "Well, until we can do that, maybe you should still know how it works. Maybe if you understand it better, you can help us figure out why it's in you at all, and…and how we can take it out, if that's what you think is best."

Connie wanted to cheer Steven up from this accidental funk she had dragged them both into. And for all she knew, he was right: knowing more about how Jade's gemstone interacted with her, and learning more about it, might help them remove it later, and would definitely help her not summon a hurricane the next time she sneezed. And maybe, just maybe, if that let her learn how to do all the cool things a Gem like Jade could do as a result…well, maybe that would be okay. Maybe.

"Warping," Connie said, and handed him the last of the dripping silverware. At his questioning glance, she grinned, and said, "I want to learn how to use a warp pad. It's so cool how you guys can go anywhere in the world anytime you want."

Steven hurried to dry and put away their dishes, and then ran back to his pad and began his list. "Yeah! What else?" he cheered.

Her smile widened. "Jumping, definitely. All of the Gems can jump crazy high, can't they?"

"Yup! Well, not so much Peridot, but yeah. C'mon, what else?"

His enthusiasm broke the last of her funk, and with the sink clean, she let herself get swept up in the new mood. "Shapeshifting!"

"Two thumbs way, way up!" Steven raised his hand and, scowling in concentration, he morphed his index finger into a second thumb.

His dysmorphic enthusiasm only lasted a few second before his finger reverted, but it sent her into a fit of giggles. "Totally. I want all the thumbs! I'll be Queen of the Thumb Wars!"

"Now we're talking!" Steven exclaimed.

As he pulled Connie back toward the couch so they could continue building their list, the warp pad chimed, and Pearl materialized from a beam of light with her spear in hand. When she saw the teens, the concerned look on her features evaporated, and so did her weapon. "Hi, there! Is Connie all settled in? Did you eat already?" Pearl called.

"Yes, ma'am," Connie answered. "To both! Steven's helping me think of everything I should learn while I'm here."

"Oh, wonderful!" Pearl said as she moved into the kitchen. "There's nothing quite like the feeling of a fresh new list to…" When she found the counter empty and clean, and likewise the sink, her words trailed off. She surveyed the immaculate room in a slow circle, her eyes narrowing in confusion.

"Everything okay, Pearl? Did you find any sign of the other Gems?" Steven asked.

"Yes," Pearl drawled, still lost in her search for something in the spotless kitchen. Then his other question registered, and she blinked. "Er, I mean, no. Nothing out there at the moment that I can find. I, um, need to go. You kids let me know if you need anything."

"Okay!" Steven called after her as the Gem left in a daze through the temple door. As it sealed shut, he scribbled a new line on the list. "We should add 'getting into the temple' to the list too. You won't have your own room, but if you ever need to get to a bubbled Gem or something…"

"Yeah!" Connie agreed. She wouldn't turn down a chance to explore the tantalizingly mysterious ancient stronghold of Earth's greatest protectors.

Tapping a pen on the pad, Steven said, "This is all just stuff the rest of us can do. What about stuff that only you can do? I mean, stuff that Jade could do?" he asked, correcting himself quickly.

Her brow crinkled. "Wind?" she said.

"And?" he said.

"Wind…blasts?" Connie said, thinking back to the disastrous first meeting between Jade and the Crystal Gems.

"And?" Steven insisted.

She thought about the beach ball Jade had propelled into the stratosphere. "Wind explosions," she said.

"And?" he exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air.

The grim memory of Pyrite's attack in Sanctuary flitted across Connie's thoughts. She remembered the razor-thin bursts of air Jade had used to cut into the massive Quartz. "Wind blades!" Connie shouted.

"That's what I'm talking about!" Steven shouted in kind, springing atop the couch cushion with excitement. "Hang on, I'm going to make a separate column for wind stuff."

Barefoot and clad in her pajamas, Connie waited outside the bathroom door, watching the sky change colors as the day came to an end. She bounced on her toes, too excited to keep still. A huge grin split her features in half.

The list was as complete as she and Steven could make it in just one day. It looped through her mind, indelibly stamped into her memory like everything else she read, but she was glad to have it. There were nearly three dozen things she and Steven had come up with, some of them real things that Jade or one of the other Gems could do, and some of them wild flights of fancy invented by one of them, as if Connie might dare the wind itself to do something impossibly cool.

"Next time I blow down the living room, it'll be on purpose," she promised herself. Still bouncing on her toes, she threw practice jabs in the air, savoring the tingle of excitement in her nerves. Her first day at the beach had passed by in a blur, and if she wasn't careful, the rest of her summer could fly by just as quickly. But she had a plan now. She had goals. And she—

—watched a gust of air rattle the screen door from the inside. And then another. And another. By the fourth, she realized that the wind was coming off her fists. Stuffing her hands under her armpits, she hugged herself and waited, growing still. Thankfully, the screen stopped rattling.

The bathroom door opened and Steven emerged from a cloud of steam, dressed in his own PJs and wearing a towel wrap in his hair. He grinned at Connie, not catching the worry in her face before she hid it behind a smile. Then his eyes bugged, and he backpedaled, slamming the bathroom closed again. As the door shut, Connie caught a glimpse of more towels on the floor, and an uncapped tube of toothpaste on the counter, and a messy array of shampoos and conditioners and body washes littering every conceivable surface. Hurried sounds of rustling came through the door as he called, "Just a minute!"

Connie backed away, her mouth pressed in frustration. Something brushed her shoulder, and she whirled, surprised to find Pearl lurking behind her suddenly. The Gem waited with a rictus smile on her face as she watched the bathroom door. "Pearl?" Connie yelped.

"Hi, Connie! Did you have a nice dinner?" Pearl asked in a thready voice, her gaze never budging from the closed bathroom door.

The last time Connie had glimpsed Pearl was just after dinner, when she and Steven had been deep in thinking of awesome wind tricks. Pearl had stalked out of the temple in something of a tizzy, taken one look at the sauce pans they had used to cook their macaroni soaking in the sink and the rest of their dishes already cleaned, and then fled back into the temple without a word.

"Yes?" Connie ventured.

"Good! Good." Pearl looked like a lioness coiled to pounce on some helpless gazelle. And when the door opened a moment later, she did pounce, bowling past Steven through the door frame. "Just a moment, Connie, let me—OH, MY STARS!"

Steven caught himself, dizzy from the Gem's rush. "Uh, hi? Pearl, is everything…?" By the time he had stopped his eyes spinning, Pearl was already vanishing back through the temple door on the far side of the house. "Huh. Okay. Well, the bathroom's all yours now, roomie!" Steven told Connie.

Connie leaned past him to find the bathroom straightened up and waiting for her. The counter was clean, the toothpaste capped, and the shampoos and conditioners neatly stacked in a basket next to the tub. He'd even wiped the fog from the mirror, though it was already gathering again in the steamy heat left over from his shower. "Thanks," she said.

Steven's smile faded, and he frowned. "Are you okay?" he asked.

With a start, Connie realized that her fists were still tucked under her armpits. Letting her hands drop, she said, "Yeah, I… I guess I'm just still adjusting."

"Adjusting is good. And it's okay if it takes some time." Steven's gentle smile returned like a sunbeam through parting clouds. Then his eyes trailed down, and his face brightened. "Oh, hey! Is that where that shirt went?"

Connie's stomach plummeted as she put her hand over the yellow star of her shirt, remembering that it was really Steven's shirt in the first place. For all the excuses she had invented to avoid giving him back the borrowed shirt, she had never considered what would happen if she took it with her to live at the beach house, which now seemed unbelievably stupid of her. "Oh! Right." She swallowed guiltily, tugging at the hem of the shirt riding above her navel. "I, um, guess you'll want it back. I can go change."

Steven studied her face intently as she fidgeted. Then he studied the shirt theatrically, humming and rubbing his chin. Finally, he leaned back and shook his head. "Wait, no. I must have been wrong. This shirt is definitely yours. My mistake."

She rolled her eyes. "Steven…"

But he remained adamant. "Trust me, I know my own shirts like the back of my pants. In fact…"

He ran to the kitchen and returned with a permanent marker. Bidding Connie to hold still, he stood behind her on his tiptoes. Connie felt a gentle touch move her hair aside, then fish out the tag of the shirt from its collar. The astringent smell of permanent ink kissed her nose, and then she heard the cap return to the marker, and her hair fell back into place.

"There. I put a 'C' on it so it won't get mixed up in the laundry. Not that it would, since it's so obviously not mine."

Connie felt her cheeks aching with the force of her smile as she turned back to him. "Thank you, Steven. You're a really good host."

"Why, thank you," he said, and curtseyed.

She ran her hands down the front of her shirt, smoothing the cheery yellow star as her stomach rose back up, helped aloft by a smattering of butterflies as she considered her best friend. "Is there anything I can do? I mean, to be a good guest?" she asked.

"What? No way!" he said. "You're a great guest."

"Sure, but…" She struggled to keep her knowing grin in check as she glanced at his sandals by the door. "It's like in Beauty and the Beast. The old one, the cartoon. Do you remember the scene where Beast couldn't use a spoon, so Belle ate porridge from the bowl like he did so he didn't feel embarrassed?"

Steven's eyes sparkled. "I love that part!"

Connie knew full well that he did. "Belle did that so Beast would feel comfortable, even though she was his guest. So is there any way I can eat my porridge that would make you more comfortable?"

"Did you know that Beast's real name is Adam?"

"Steven…" Connie said reproachfully.

He shook his head. "Seriously, I can't think of anything. This is great!"

"Nothing? You can't think of even one little thing?" Connie teased.

"Not even the tiniest anything," he promised, crossing his heart.

"Because it sure would be 'neat' if I could think of something to do as a way to thank you for all of this," Connie said, leaning on the one word as hard as she could.

Steven's face underwent a brief war of uncertainty before he finally relented. "Well, there is one thing," he admitted, and winced in anticipation.

She made her face solemn, hiding her smile again. "Name it."

"We kind of—and it's not your fault, since you aren't usually here all the time!" he said quickly. "But we kind of have a looser vibe around here. Just about certain things. So maybe you'd have an easier time adjusting if you were just a little, teensier, tiny, itty-bitty bit more…"

"…messy?" she supplied.

He held his thumb and forefinger a hair's breadth apart. "I mean, maybe just a little bit."

Connie wandered back toward the couch, pretending to be lost in thought. Her hand came to rest on the edge of her open foot locker still resting on the coffee table. "Messier, huh? You mean, like this?"

And she snatched up one of her folded shirts from the locker, wadding it up in her fist and hurling it at Steven in one fluid motion.

Steven rocked backwards under the surprise attack, his shocked face disappearing behind the shirt wrapped around his head. By the time he pulled the shirt from his face, Connie had already armed herself with an armload of shirts, socks, and pants, and was strafing across the room with another salvo flying at him. He grinned, ducking a pair of rolled-up socks, and sprinted to the couch, where his basket of folded laundry had been left. "Oh, it's on now!" he crowed, and scooped out half the basket's contents.

She and Steven ran circles around each other, trading sartorial missiles and filling the house to the rafters with a storm of giggles. Furniture became cover, and then obstacles as they leapt and bounded, turning the room into a ridiculous battlefield.

As their laundry fight raged on, with spent ammo grabbed off the floor to be reused by both sides, the temple door parted. "—telling you, something is terribly wrong!" Pearl insisted, dragging Garnet and Amethyst each by an arm into the house. "The children are—Oh!" When she saw the laundry arcing through the air, littering floor and furniture, the graceful Gem froze in shock.

"Aw, sweet!" Amethyst shook off Pearl's numb grasp and charged into the fray. She leapt and blurred her form into white light, expanding into an enormous crocheted sweater made from thick purple fibers. The arms of the sweater snaked out to wrestle with Connie and Steven, and the hem of the sweater produced a lanky purple tongue as it flapped open to cry, "Banzai!"

"Looks fine to me," Garnet said.

Pearl answered with a long sigh of relief, sagging backwards against Garnet's chest.

Chapter Text

Connie sat with her knees drawn up to her chest as she watched the tide climb up the beach to nip at her bare toes. The water was dark in the clear night, and it colored the sand in front of her with a trace of white foam. Overhead, the entire universe loomed, a million-million-million possibilities, each one a point of light more brilliant than it ever could have been from her bedroom window.

When she stared up at the sky, it felt like she would fall up and away from the ground. The sensation of living at the edge of the world like this thrilled her, terrified her. Part of her wanted to fall just to see what would happen. Would she lose herself in eternity? Would she find herself? Find a new self?

She was up way past her bedtime. Anything could happen.

But one thought anchored her to the ground. She touched the heavy weight beneath her throat, letting her fingers trace its boxy shape as they had a hundred times before. And each time she did, she could feel the weight's true shape, the way it twisted and curled inside of her to form the same five words it would always be: it should have been me. She wasn't supposed to be here, but she was.

She knew how excited Steven was to teach her all about having a Gem, about being a Gem. But Connie was never supposed to be a Gem, and she could never forget that. Not as long as she carried Jade's gemstone, and remembered that a Gem had given her life so that Connie could be there. It was hard to let herself be excited too, when she thought about the promise she had made to Jade that she hadn't been allowed to keep.

But she wanted to be excited. She wanted to learn all about being a Gem. She had wanted to learn everything there was to know about the Gems ever since that day Steven had caught her in his bubble. He had saved her life too, and brought so much more into her life than she ever knew possible.

Jade had only wanted one thing for as long as Connie had known her, and that was to be free of Connie's squishy, sloshy, gooshy human body. But keeping that promise, making that happen now, wouldn't do Jade any good. It would invalidate everything she and Steven had worked for to build their amazing summer together. It couldn't bring Jade back.

…could it?

Chasing the tail of her own thoughts, Connie stared out at the ocean. Her gaze flitted through the starlight dancing in the waves. Even with no moon, the water was bright and alive, reflecting the universe back at itself. And that made it possible for her to spot a shape bobbing far off from the shore.

Connie shot to her feet. For half a breath, she worried that it might be a swimmer caught in the undertow. But with a second's panicked observation, she realized that the shape was far too small to be a person. It was a square corner cresting the surface with each passing wave.

Curiosity tugged her a step closer, and wet sand crept between her toes. That object could have been any piece of flotsam. She and Steven had found umpteen hundred curios of refuse washed up in his front yard. But something told her that this was no pizza box lost to the tide. This was something important.

She bit her lip. It wouldn't be safe for her to swim it. Perhaps she could wake Steven, or knock on the temple door until one of the Gems answered. But the object might vanish back into the water by the time she found anyone. So, since she couldn't swim, she stepped out onto the water instead, wobbling atop the gentle rise and fall of the ocean as she trekked out from shore.

With awkward high steps, Connie teetered atop the ocean. It took her a while to gain confidence in her gait, but soon enough she was hopping each wave at a jog. Still, it felt like a long time before she finally reached the object. With the world rolling beneath her, she bent and hooked her fingers around the corner.

A book pulled free from the water, dripping in her hands as she examined the cover. Its color was indistinct, muddled by the starlight, but she could make out one of the words embossed on the cover: Jade.

Connie fell to her knees, clutching the book to her chest, where it rattled against the square stone at her throat. As the ocean rolled underneath her, lifting up and soaking through her socks, she looked toward the horizon. More square corners were bobbing in the water. Dozens of shapes. Hundreds. It was impossible to count them all, because the stars grew dark out at the edge of the world, casting everything in shadow.

That's when it occurred to Connie that she might not actually be up past her bedtime after all.

Connie woke with a start. Her whole body seized, rocking her military cot onto two legs before it knocked back to the floor. She stared at the strange ceiling, her chest pumping like a bellows, her heart thundering in her ears, and tried to understand.

No, the ceiling was not strange. This was Steven's house. And that nest of blankets piled on top of a surplus cot was her new bed. She was supposed to be there. Slowly her breathing eased and her heart rate relaxed, and she sagged back into the tangled blankets.

For a long time, Connie tried to relax herself back to sleep. Maybe if she did, she could return to that unreal shore and find that book again. Was it real? Well, obviously it wasn't real-real. But was it something more than a product of her imagination? That beach had always been something special, a place created between Connie and Jade. It hadn't appeared to her since Jade had…

She tried to sleep, but couldn't. Something felt wrong, and it wasn't a new wrong. It was familiar, but more prominent now. Back at home, it had been a constant whisper among old comforts, a weight in her shoes that made her tired.

But the beach house was quieter than home. It was so, so quiet, with only the gentle sounds of the ocean. And because of that quiet, Connie finally understood what was wrong with her.

It was silence. Connie had silence inside of her.

For months, Connie had lived every moment of her life with someone else inside of her. Jade's voice had never touched her ears. It had lived in her mind. Even when the Gem had nothing to say, Jade's feelings, her every impulse, had pressed against Connie's awareness. Connie had been forced to make room inside of her mind for an entirely different person to share it.

Now that person was gone. Those thoughts and feelings that had seemed just like her own had vanished, and nothing had filled the empty space yet. Connie was half-hollow. She was alone. And in the quiescence of the beach house, that whisper, that weight in her shoes, now felt like a roar in her ears, like a slab of granite pressing down on her chest.

She suddenly became aware of dark eyes watching her from above. Turning her head, she saw a nest of curly hair disappear into a cocoon of blankets atop Steven's bed. A moment later, the hair emerged again, and the eyes returned through a gap in the blankets. "I wasn't staring. I promise!" Steven whispered.

A tiny smile broke through Connie's gloom. "Somebody forgot to tell that to your eyes," she teased in a soft voice.

Crinkles framed his eyes, belying a smile. Then they smoothed with concern. "Can't sleep?"

She shook her head. "It's…quiet," she admitted.

The blanket cocoon wriggled to the edge of the bed, peering down to Connie's cot below. "Since we're both awake, do you want to have a sleepover?"

Her smile widened, and a tiny laugh shook the slab pressing down on her. "I thought we already were," she said.

In answer, Steven crawled out of his cocoon. He rooted underneath his bed for a moment, and then slid off the edge of the loft to land on the couch just inches from the cot. A caterpillar-shaped sleeping bag fluttered behind him, landing draped over his head. "When I'm up there, we're in our rooms," he explained unseen, still fishing himself out from under the bag.

She could practically hear her father having a nervous breakdown at the idea of Connie sleeping within fifty feet of a boy, let alone fifty inches. "Obviously," she said.

"But if I'm down here, we can sleep together," Steven said, emerging from the bag. His eyes bugged, and he amended, "With each other. –next to each other!"

Connie tittered. The panic she imagined in her father seemed to be infectious. But it made the hollowness inside of her a little bit smaller. "That sounds great."

Steven wriggled into his bag, having emerged from his cocoon to become a caterpillar instead. His smiling face hung right in front of hers as he stretched out on the couch. "I've only ever had one sleepover before, and that was with the Gems. And we mostly just dreamed."

"it's my first one," Connie admitted. "Well, technically, Jade had one with Lapis, but I slept through it. What do we do besides sleep?"

"Ooh! How about we tell each other secrets? That's a sleepover classic. I'll go first!" He craned his neck, pushing his face forward until it was almost touching hers. "I'm really glad you're here," he whispered.

Her smile won the war, blossoming in full. "Was that a secret?" she asked.

His own smile turned sheepish as he pulled back onto the couch. "Not really. But I tell you pretty much everything already, so it's hard to think of anything." Then he settled into the cushions and waited expectantly for her turn.

Connie bit her lip, running through all the secrets tumbling around inside of her. I don't know what to do now that Jade is gone. I feel bad for wanting to still carry her gemstone, but I feel guilty for wanting it gone. I don't want to disappoint you, or her, but I don't know what I can do that won't disappoint you both. Somehow, even though I've never felt emptier, I have so many stupid feelings inside of me that I think I'm going to explode and ruin the lovely home you were nice enough to open to me.

Any part of that jumble would have been enough to send Steven running. It made Connie want to run, and it was inside of her. So she carved off the smallest sliver of it that she could, and only gave him a tiny piece of that.

"I want to be a Crystal Gem."

Steven blinked at her, confused. "I thought you already were," he said.

She shook her head. "Not just as Pearl's student. Not just as a human with a sword. If whatever's happening to me doesn't stop, if it keeps growing, then I want to use it. I want to protect the Earth." A little extra piece of the sliver escaped, and without meaning to, she added, "It was Jade's planet."

Steven's deep, dark eyes watched her. She could see questions brimming in his stare. But all he said was, "It's your planet too."

"Yeah," Connie said, breaking her gaze from his. "Anyway, that's my only secret. Sorry. Kinda silly, huh?"

"Let's do it." His voice was pure, undiluted Steven: earnest and clear. His eyes glittered in the dark. "If you feel like you need something to make you more of a Crystal Gem than you already are, then let's find it, or do it, or make it. Starting tomorrow, we're on a mission to make you a Crystal Gem."

The slab on Connie's chest lifted another inch. Blinking hard, her eyes growing warm, she whispered, "Can I tell you another secret?"

"Yeah!" he exclaimed in a whisper.

"I'm really glad I'm here too."

His grin lit the dark room like a floodlight. "Okay, now that we got that out of the way, we can get to the serious sleepover topics. Like, who would win in a fight: a gigantic ice cream golem, or a mutated spicy pepper kaiju monster?"

Connie laughed. "Why would they fight?"

"They're fire and ice. They hurt each other. And there's no lukewarm third monster to help them reconcile their differences. A tragic misunderstanding that grew out of control."

"Peppers are spicy because of capsaicin," Connie pointed out. "They'd still be relatively the same as the ambient temperature of their battleground."

"That's a major advantage for the ice cream golem," Steven noted gravely.

They talked long into the night, trying to one-up each other with the most profound nothings their sleepy brains could muster. Connie found it easy to keep talking, even as she had to struggle to stop herself from saying what she really wanted him to hear. What really mattered was just hearing him talk. It didn't fill the hollow inside of her, but it made it ache less.

Sleep reclaimed Steven first. The pauses between his wild hypotheticals grew longer, until he finally nodded off. Connie let him slip away, content to let him rest. After the tumult of the day, she felt ready for the same. And perhaps if she could, she might find her way back to the beach in her dreams, where that book might wait for her again.

Tell the Crystal Gems that they need to be better. They won their rebellion, so I expect them to act accordingly as stewards of my planet.

They were some of Jade's final words, and they echoed in her mind. Connie could only imagine what the proud Homeworld soldier would have thought of Connie's "secret" to Steven. She would have cracked herself rather than move into the temple to become a Crystal Gem. But they were the only ones left to protect the Earth. And Flint, Milky, and Pyrite were still out there somewhere. Maybe given the extreme circumstances, Jade wouldn't hate her for it, as long as she saved the world.

Connie didn't get to be sorry, or feel sorry for herself. Not anymore. Jade had left her stone in Connie. And as long as Connie carried it for her, she would do what she could to protect the planet they both loved.

Moving silently, so as not to wake Steven, Connie crept from her nest and into the kitchen. The pad and pen they had used earlier still sat at the edge of the counter where Steven had left it. A litany of Gem powers and wind moves filled the page, as many as they'd been able to conceive of in an afternoon. Taking up the pen, she found room for two more lines, and squeezed them into the page in the tiniest letters she could manage.

Be a Crystal Gem

Be a Jade

She stared at the page, letting the new words scorch themselves into her thoughts.

Chapter Text

She rose with the dawn. The sound of gentle snoring rocked the giant caterpillar on the couch while she folded her blankets and collapsed the All Cot Up to stow under the coffee table. Then she changed in the bathroom, practically leaping into a pair of shorts and an old sleeveless T-shirt of her father's, which she had to tie off at her waist. She wasn't sure who The Herculoids were—some old band?—but they emblazoned her chest on her path to true Crystal Gemhood, a crest she hoped would prove worthy of the stone underneath it.

The sand was still cool as she hit the beach, following the shoreline at a jog. Reds and oranges were already fading into a clear blue horizon, and a handful of sailboats dotted the water, riding the same wispy breeze that stirred her hair. It was a far cry from the ocean and night sky of her dreams.

Try as she might, Connie hadn't been able to find her way back to that dream beach and the books lost in its ocean. The rest of her night had passed in a blur and ended with a tiny crick in her neck that four out of five drill sergeants would have approved. But she refused to let that slow her now. If she couldn't find success in her dreams, she could make it happen in the waking world.

Her legs felt stiff before she made it to the edge of Funland's fence. Lungs burning, she turned around and loped back for the house. She had to walk the last bit, rounding the cliff side with a stitch in her ribs. It was a good ache, and she savored the warm air rushing through her as she gulped for air.

When she let herself through the screen door, she found Steven already dressed and wiggling into his sandals. His smile was like a second sunrise waking Connie all over again when he saw her enter. "Good morning!" he sang. "Are you ready for the first day of your awesome journey to becoming a Crystal Gem-Gem? Are you ready for adventures, excitement, mystery and intrigue, and maybe a few musical numbers along the way?"

Suppressing a grin, Connie pressed a fist into her open palm and bowed. "Hai, Sensei," she intoned gravely.

His smile dimmed. "Eh, I don't know if that fits," he admitted.

Both arms went to her sides, and she bowed more deeply. "Yes, Master," she answered.

Steven's smile collapsed entirely. "That just makes you sound like a genie," he said.

It became a real challenge to keep from smiling now, but Connie barely managed. "Of course, Milord," she said, and bent to one knee, lowering her head.

He waved his hands, exclaiming, "Definitely not!"

The giggles overtook her, and Connie rose back to her feet shaky with laughter. "Okay," she said. "How about Coach?"

Steven's eyes and mouth both went round as he gasped in realization. He rushed to his dresser, digging through his identical wardrobe for something different. When he came back, he wore a pink tank top and a red-white striped headband. A set of dark aviator sunglasses masked his eyes, and the whistle he had used in his camp counselor getup from the day before swung once more from its cord around his neck. "Now we're ready!" he said.

"Yeah!" cheered Connie.

"Let the adventure begin!" Steven cried, lifting his fists above his head.

"Yeah!" Connie shouted, leaping into the air with her own fists raised.

A dull avalanche of crunching noise rattled through Connie's head as she chewed. She hunched over her bowl, perched on a kitchen stool at the island counter, and stared down at the tiny brown cubes floating in milk.

On the stool next to her, Steven perused the back of a cereal box, reading between mouthfuls of drippy brown cubes he spooned out of his own bowl. He had offered to investigate the ingredient list for Connie after her careless glance at the box had booked the name of the cereal into her mind. "Nope. That's really the only ingredient," he said.

Her eyebrows rose in mild surprise, and she poked the cubes in her bowl with the tip of her spoon. Most cereals grew soggy after only a few minutes, or discolored the milk. This cereal did neither. "Really? No preservatives? Sugar? Salt? Monosodium glutamate?"

He checked again and shook his head. Turning the box around, he looked at the bold, plain text above the blandly drawn cartoon cereal bowl that was the logo. "It's just like the name says: It's Bran." Then he turned to the back of the box again and brightened momentarily. "Ooh, and there's a fun maze on the back you can… Nope. Solved it. It was just a straight line."

Connie sighed and watched her long breath stir the bits of It's Bran into a lazy spin around the edge of her bowl. The sigh caught Steven's notice, and when she saw eyebrows raised high above his sunglasses in a questioning look, she said, "I know it's important to have a good breakfast, but I guess I imagined this going differently."

"Like how?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, shrugging. "Pushups, and yelling, and chugging raw eggs, and punching sides of meat. Stuff you see in boxing movies. But I guess it is kind of silly."

Steven contemplated his bowl of cereal. After a deep pause, he looked up and said, "I mean, we do have eggs…"

She met his gaze with a wide-eyed stare. Slowly, the same dangerous smile grew in both of their faces.

Less than two minutes later, each of them held a short, brimming glass. A half-empty carton of eggs sat open on the counter with broken shells littered around it. Three cheery yellow egg yolks bobbed as Connie lifted her glass to examine her new, more action-oriented breakfast. Her excitement dimmed a little when she saw Steven staring down his own glass with less enthusiasm. "You don't have to do this too," she told him.

Shaking his head, he looked up from the glass with a grin. "No way. I'm your Gem coach. If I'm with you on this adventure, I'm with you every step of the way." He raised his glass, and his grin broadened. "Now let's start this adventure for real!"

"Yeah!" Connie cheered. They clinked glasses and then chugged.

Connie strode out of the bathroom feeling weirdly refreshed. Her heart was still thumping in her ears, but her stomach felt more settled again. Mouthwash still tingled on her lips, masking not only the taste of the vomit, but also the memory of the disgusting raw eggs. She had never before felt so energized after puking out her guts, but it was working for her, so she went with the feeling.

Across the room, Steven was rinsing out the sink. Ever the gentleman, he had offered her the bathroom first, and puked into the sink instead. He turned off the rumbling garbage disposal and threw away his used paper towels. "Guess they leave this part out of those movie montages," he said, and burped.

"Maybe it's an acquired taste," Connie said.

"Now," Steven began again, lifting his fists overhead, "are you really, really, really ready to—"

Connie lifted her hands to stop him. "We should probably just get to it. If we keep starting the adventure, I might not have any time left to learn anything," she said.

"Good point," agreed Steven. He turned his aviators across the house, reflecting upon it in the wide, dark lenses. After a moment's thought, he fixed on the warp pad. Pointing, he declared, "Let's start there. Hop on!"

Connie rushed to the warp pad before he had even finished speaking. Warping was at the top of her Gem wish list, and she had been hoping to start there. Every Gem could warp, no matter their age or power or ability, so why couldn't she? Technically, she had done so already, back at Ascension, when…

She pushed the memory out of her mind, focusing on her excitement instead while Steven climbed onto the pad to stand next to her. Even though she knew it was her imagination, she felt the soles of her feet tingling at the tremendous power in the crystal beneath her. Using nothing but her will, she would propel herself thousands of miles, shooting herself through a slipstream of unearthly design. "Ready!" she said, and crouched, waiting for his instruction.

"Warping is easy," he told her. "It's about knowing where you want to go, and then sending yourself there. So picture where you want to go, and then, go!"

Connie frowned down at the crystal. The bluish material did not reveal anything new to her as she stared, but the imagined tingle in her feet did disappear. "Um, how do I 'go'? I know there's no activation phrase, or anything, and I never see you or the Gems make any kind of motion or pose. Is there something more technical you can give me?"

The question seemed to puzzle him, as though he hadn't considered it before deciding to teach her. He had thought about how to teach her, hadn't he? "Um… Oh! When I want to go somewhere, I focus on where I want to go, and then it…kind of happens. So why don't you think really hard about where you want to go?"

"Okay…" Connie drawled.

"How about the sky arena? You go there all the time with Pearl, so maybe it'll make your first warp easier."

She deepened her stance, trying to focus on the idea of the arena. The warp pad remained frustratingly dark underneath her. She tried again. Still nothing. Each time she tried to focus harder on the abstract idea of the place, piecing it together in her mind, the pieces seemed to grow fuzzier under a layer of frustration that kept growing thicker with each passing second she remained stuck on the pad.

Her lungs started to burn, and she realized she was holding her breath. She exhaled in a big bwuff and leaned on her knees. "So, you can't warp anywhere you've never been before? You have to know where you're going?" she panted, using the question to catch her breath.

He shook his head. "I'm pretty sure I can't. But the Gems are always with me whenever I go somewhere new. And they've been around long enough to know all the warp spots on Earth."

Connie couldn't help but remember that the Crystal Gems hadn't known about Ascension, or any of the other locations on the newly connected Homeworld network Jade had given them. The memory put a layer of gloom over the layer of frustration, and now the imagined sky arena in her thoughts was entirely buried under the distractions. "I don't really know what I'm doing wrong, but it's definitely not working," Connie confessed.

Steven frowned for a moment, and then brightened. "Don't think about it. Try feeling about it. You know?"

"Kinda?" Connie lied as she felt her face twist in confusion.

"Like, powers are all about feelings. So don't 'think' about the arena, just concentrate on how you feel when you're there," Steven instructed her. He motioned to his face, which stretched into exaggerated smiles and frowns so quickly that it looked like he was going insane. Then he finally settled on a smile, framing it with his hands, and said, "Feel the arena, and then grab those feelings and push them up inside of you."

Connie closed her eyes and crouched low, resting her fingertips on the cool surface of the pad. She tried conjuring the sensations of the arena—the crisp thinness of the air, the sight of clouds and landscape spread endlessly in all directions below the arena's edge—and used them as a backdrop for her excitement at learning the sword, her joy in her skills' development, her glowing joy in Pearl's approval.

Slowly but surely, the feelings she built up seemed to swirl together in the pit of her stomach. They rotated slowly at first, and then spun faster, mixing together into one sensation: the feeling she felt whenever she picked up a sword. As she concentrated, it spun faster and faster. "I think…I think it's working," she said, struggling to speak around the rising force.

"Good!" Steven cheered. "Grab on to those feelings. Lift them up. Use them to lift us both up to the arena!"

She practically vibrated with the force of the feeling now. Cold sweat dampened her forehead as she bent low, pressing her palms to the crystal, squeezing her eyes shut, as the feeling surged upward—

Connie staggered out of the bathroom, groaning as she wiped her mouth. The sound of the flushing chased after her, making her stomach twitch.

Apparently that refreshed feeling she had felt after the first round of vomiting had been a ruse to lull her into a sense of false security before the real puking started. Now it felt as though she had barfed half of her insides into the toilet, leaving her empty and sore and tired, even while her guts told her that round three could start anytime it wanted with no warning whatsoever.

Steven stood on tiptoe at the sink, wringing out the towel he had used to clean the other half of her insides off the warp pad. Looking over his shoulder, he called, "Feel better?"

She answered with a noncommittal burp.

Worry creased Steven's forehead. "Maybe we should take it easy for your first day," he said as he tossed the towel into the kitchen hamper under the sink. "We can slow down until you feel better."

A swell of panic nearly triggered that third round her stomach was threatening. "No!" she cried, and burped again. Clutching her middle, she scowled and swallowed hard, and then said, "No, I'm okay. Let's keep going. But let's move outside. I don't think I'm going to get warping today, and I don't want to mess up any floors again in case…"

He looked for a moment as though he would argue, but in the end Steven nodded and led the way outside. The sights and smells of the beach at morning were a good balm for Connie's stomach. She took a deep breath, letting the warm ocean air fill a little of the empty space in her.

Steven's aviators circled the sand, and then turned blue against the sky. "Hmm. Clear day. No local air traffic. Okay! Let's try the Gem Jump," he declared.

They moved to a clear section of beach. Steven hunched forward, spreading his arms and wriggling his sandals. His brows vanished behind reflective lenses as he set his features with concentration.

"You want to get a good stance going. Not too deep, or you'll lose power. Then, you just feel confident about it, and—"

He blurred into the sky, leaving a blast of sand where he had stood. Connie tried to follow the motion, but had to squint against the gritty spray, and then searched for him in the expansive sky. Seconds later she spotted a pink dot against the blue, and she ran a handful of yards to meet it as Steven floated gently back to the ground.

"Of course, none of the other Gems can fall as slowly as I can. Which sounds like a weird brag, but I'm owning it," Steven explained as he drifted the last few feet to the ground. "But the others seem to be able to land okay without crashing."

Connie grinned as she mimicked his crouch from a moment before. She knew jumping. What kid didn't? And plus or minus a floating power, Gem Jumping just seemed like regular jumping on overdrive. "Okay. Bent knees. Feeling confident. Aaand…"

She cleared a full twelve inches on her first try. It was a respectable height, but not the cloud-punching leap she had been wanting. Still, when she landed in the sand, she still had a big grin on her face to match Steven's. Neither of them expected her to get anything on her first try. It just felt good to be doing something at last.

The second failed jump couldn't diminish Connie's smile. Neither could the third failed jump. Or the fourth. Or the fortieth.

Jump number one hundred and thirty-seven, though, proved to be a smile-killer. The aching corners of her mouth dropped, and then the rest of her followed, collapsing into a heap on the sand. Her lungs were burning, and her legs felt like two numb rods of pain forcibly jammed up into her hips. By the final ten attempts, she wasn't even sure if her feet left the ground or not.

Steven rested a hand on her shoulder before she could try jumping straight from her knees. "Let's change it up. Maybe if you took a running jump instead?"

Connie waited at one end of the beach while Steven went to the other, giving her a chance to regain feeling in her legs. Using his toes, he dragged a long finish line in the sand, and then stood at the end of it. "Really go for it!" he called to Connie. Then he blew his whistle, and she lurched forward, sprinting at the line as hard as she could.

With each footfall pounding into the sand, Connie concentrated on the words of Douglas Adams, the foremost expert on unpowered human flight: throw yourself at the ground and miss, she told herself.

With that galactic hitchhiker-tested certainty locked in her mind, Connie barreled up to the line and launched herself off of it with both feet, stretching her arms out before her as she left the beach. In the next glorious instant, she felt herself unshackled from the bonds of gravity, soaring free of the Earth with nothing to keep her aloft except her own sheer will.

The instant after that, gravity objected to her audacity by slamming her back into the ground, where she carved a short trench into the beach with her face. Her flying had been less Douglass Adams and more Buzz Lightyear: falling with style, minus the style.

Steven tripped over himself to help her up, but she waved off his hand. The sunglasses did nothing to hide his guilty expression, which made her feel even worse for failing while she tried to suck the air back into her lungs. "Maybe it's a question of motivation?" he said. "Like, if you had something to jump over…"

As he trailed off, Connie saw a flash of pink reflecting in his aviators. She followed his gaze up to the porch, where a mountain of fur was sunning itself, its tufted peak rising and falling in slumber. Lion, too, was making the most of the summer morning, though with a different opinion about the amount of effort to put into it.

Her coach leapt into action, quite literally, clearing the porch in a single bound from where they stood. It was far less easy for him to convince Lion to abandon his nap, but eventually an armload of open tuna cans managed to coax the great cat down to the beach. Connie didn't mind the delay, because it gave her another chance to get the blood pumping in her legs again, and besides which, Steven's cajoling of Lion was practically its own cute little sitcom playing out just for her. She was happy to be the laugh track to their show.

After depositing the cans on the ground, Steven stepped clear, nearly bowled out of the way as Lion began emptying the little aluminum treasures of their fishy goodness. Wiping his hands clean on his pants, he pointed to Lion and said, "There. Now, when you run, try to jump over Lion. After all, you wouldn't want to hit this poor, beautiful, majestic king of the jungle, would you?" He patted Lion's flank, a tender gesture that went wholly ignored.

Connie backed up again, keeping her focus trained on the pink beast. She took a deep breath, thought confident, airy thoughts, and ran.

Lion let out a tiny chuff noise when Connie slammed into his ribs. The blow didn't even jostle him or pause him from the last morsels stubbornly clinging to the rim of the tuna cans. But Connie felt jostled as she collapsed onto her back, watching stars spin in her vision against a big pink backdrop.

"…good effort?" Steven said, wincing.

Finished with his snack, Lion spared an irritated look at Steven before he sauntered back to the porch to resume his nap. Connie didn't even warrant such a look, but the cat's tail flicked her across the nose as he left, so she guessed he was equally displeased with her.

"Okay, that's my bad," said Steven. "I got it backwards. Anybody would try to hug Lion instead of hurdling him. What we need is something you want to get away from, something you can't stand so much that just seeing it will make you want to get as far away from—Oh! I know!"

Minutes later, Steven had wrestled a large cardboard box down the porch stairs and planted it at the jumping line. A layer of dust wafted off the box's open top, a sign of the box being long forgotten, but the logo on its side was unforgettable: it was a picture of a sculpted male bodybuilder flexing his arms across the breadth of the logo, dressed only in bicycle shorts and wearing a creepily realistic horse mask.

Steven grinned, turning his aviators between Connie and the hated box. "Eh? Right?" he said.

Connie stared at the enormous cardboard case of ¡Soy Delicioso! The all-vegan, gluten-free, carbon-neutral meal replacement system had once starved Connie half to death, and made her miserable with every single chalky, sticky, flavorlessly vile bar while it did so. Steven had freed it from its banishment behind the living room couch. She could feel its false horse eyes staring back at her, staring right into her very soul.

Bending low into a runner's starting stance, Connie glared back at the box, meeting its dead stare. "Let's do this," she uttered.

Feet pelting across the sand, Connie ran with everything she had left in her, never letting her eyes stray from the cardboard as her arms and legs pumped furiously. She didn't think about the jump to come, or even about the box itself. Instead she filled her mind with the memory of every awful bite she had ever eaten from that horrible brand's horrible product line. Every offense that stupid bar had ever made against every one of her senses filled her, and she pushed those feelings out into a frenzied battle cry as she reached the box and leapt.

She did not fly. She didn't even jump all that high.

But for one moment, Connie felt something. It was larger than she was, much larger. But more…ephemeral. It moved with her, around her, and against her. It rippled in her wake and parted for her as she pierced it. The new sensation made her gasp, and she felt it inside of her too.

Then she crashed into the cardboard box, tipping it over as she tumbled across the open top of it. A deluge of bars buried Connie as she hit the sand and dragged half the box's innards onto her.

Groaning, Connie sat up, letting the ¡Soy Delicioso! spill off of her. It pooled into her lap and surrounded her, crinkling under her palms as she braced herself on the ground. When she tried to reach for that strange sensation again, it was gone, lost amidst a headache that throbbed all the way down to her toes.

"Connie?" Steven said, approaching slowly.

Frustration proved to be a good anesthetic, keeping her too mad to care about how much her body hurt. Her stomach was still gurgling with the promise to send back anything she put in it, and the most disgusting "food" imaginable was all around her as if to dare her to try it. Her legs felt like tired fire, and the rest of her muscles were quickly catching up.

But a million times worse than all of that was having to admit to herself that she had expected this to be easier. Hadn't she already warped, and jump—flown!—before, back in the Battle of Ascension, when Jade—

"Connie!"

She looked up at Steven's alarm, expecting to see some unexpected danger. Instead, she got a mouthful of her own whipping hair. Only then did she realize that the wind was surging around the two of them in a mini-cyclone. Sand cut hard against her skin as the wind picked up speed, moving with enough force to scatter the meal bars in her lap. Hurriedly, Connie crushed her eyes shut and remembered the worst knock-knock joke her father had ever told her, looping it in her thoughts until the scraping winds around them settled back into a breeze.

Steven's gentle touch opened Connie's eyes. He helped her out of the mound of ¡Soy Delicioso! The sunglasses had been blown off of his face, and lay twisted some feet away, their lenses gone. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"'Orange' who?" Connie answered, still stuck in the joke loop. Then she shook her head clear and groaned, "I mean, sorry. I didn't mean to…"

"I get it," he said, and offered her a consoling smile. "I really, really do."

Of course he did. Steven as the only other person on the planet who would. And even though she wished that made her feel better, it didn't.

She sighed and started to gather the ¡Soy Delicioso! back into its box. "I guess we should clean up and then move on. My legs don't have any jumping left in them, but we can still try something else."

A soft, gentle guitar riff came in reply, making her freeze. The tinny music was coming from Steven's phone, which he held back in a jaunty stance while his other hand waited, outstretched. Connie melted as the riff blossomed into a familiar song, and she straightened, staring in wonder at Steven.

"I think we should try a Gem power we know you can already do," he told her.

Connie's face exploded into a grin, and she took Steven's hand in an instant. She yelped in delight as he pulled her off her feet, leaving behind all of her aches and frustrations as he swung her into a dizzying spin. Her body fell into step with his at once, and they became a living orbit that circled one another to the tempo of their song.

The motion felt so natural, just as it always did with Steven, like her body knew what to do all on its own. It felt like a fire rekindled from embers, like waking refreshed from a thousand-year slumber to greet a bright new epoch. It was lightness and happiness made physical with each step of the familiar dance.

The thing that had made it dangerous for Stevonnie to exist was gone. Jade had taken the corruption with her into that empty sky. Where Jade had saved Connie, she had saved the fusion as well. And as keenly as Connie still felt the loss, she also felt grateful that she could be part of something, of someone, as wonderful as Stevonnie.

Sea, sand, and sky became a blur around them as Connie laughed and spun, keeping her eyes on Steven and his delighted features. A bright pink glow dawned from under his tank top, filling the air with rosy light. Feeling brighter and brighter, Connie held Steven's hands tightly in her own and let her self go, and the pink light engulfed them both, and then…

Chapter Text

Nothing.

The night Stevonnie had occurred, or transpired, or emerged—becoming something that words were ill-equipped to describe—Connie could remember a lot of confusion, not all of it her own. Merging into a singular experience made from the concurrent identity of two different individuals was something she could never have imagined, something that had literally never happened to another human. It had been intense, and bewildering, and an incredible rush.

Now, when all of that did not happen, Connie found herself just as bewildered in the opposite direction, unable to comprehend why she was still only a singular person instead of part of something so much more.

Her hands became clammy against Steven's, and she instantly felt a pressure as his eyes clouded with worry. Their laughter ended, and the pink glow between them vanished, making the sunny day dim once more. Connie's sweaty grasp slipped, and the two of them careened out of each other's orbit, landing apart on the sand.

For a moment she could only stare at Steven as she caught her breath and tried to parse out what hadn't happened. "Steven?" she said, packing all of her questions into his name.

"I…I don't know," he admitted. He lifted the hem of his tank top and craned his neck to examine his gemstone. "I'm so sorry! This has never happened to me before. Well, sort of, back when I was learning how. But I never thought it would happen with us! Maybe it was something we ate?"

The truth dragged Connie's gaze to the sand. She rubbed at her arm and said, "Steven, I think it's—"

His eyes bugged, and he cried, "No!" The volume of his voice startled them both, and he visibly forced himself calm as he dug into his pocket for his phone. "No, that's not it. We just need to try again. Maybe we just need different music. Come on!" When he held out his hand to her this time, his smile looked almost painful. "Let's dance."

They tried old moves that felt emptily familiar. They tried new moves that didn't fit them and felt uncomfortable. Up-tempo, slow dancing, tap dancing, which somehow put sand up her shorts and down her shoes at the same time. Jazz made no sense to her. Hula dancing was a little fun. But none of it worked.

The wellspring of music in Steven's library was far from exhausted, but he struggled to choose the next genre. "Okay, I don't usually break out the reggae, but maybe if we try jammin' a little—"

"Steven!" Connie cried. He jerked to a halt with his thumb poised over his phone, and the surprised hurt he wore on his features stung her. But she pushed through it to say the words they both needed to hear. "It isn't the music. The problem is us."

Eyes shimmering, Steven clutched his phone to his chest. "You and me?" he squeaked.

"No," Connie said. Her fingers wrapped into the Herculoids logo over her chest to cup the shape beneath her neck. "Me and Jade."

"But Jade isn't…" Steven caught himself too late to swallow all of the words behind a grimace. He tried again, "My mom wasn't the reason I couldn't fuse with another Gem before. I just needed someone I felt connected to in a different way." A tiny, shy smile peered out from behind his worry.

"Jade isn't my mom. She didn't give me her stone the way you got yours," Connie argued. "She didn't really give it to me at all. It just stayed inside of me after she left." Her fingertips ached against the edges of the shape.

His mouth parted, but no reply emerged. The watery shimmer in his eyes deepened. "We'll figure it out. It'll just take more time than we thought."

She twitched when he tried to rest a comforting touch on her shoulder, making him recoil. Twisting away, she turned her head and mumbled, "I just need a minute, Steven. Gonna catch my breath, or whatever."

"…sure. I'll go get us something to drink." Everything about Steven screamed that he wanted to do exactly the opposite. Connie could hear it in his voice, in his breathing, even in the way he walked. "No eggs," he added, with a single coughing laugh following it.

Connie gritted her teeth and remained perfectly still until she heard the screen door close behind him. She hated making Steven feel bad. And she never expected to wake up and instantly become an expert on Gem powers, even though that would have been a nice surprise, and extremely convenient.

But not being able to fuse anymore? Not being a part of Stevonnie anymore after the possibility had come back so recently, out of the worst possible tragedy? That was one setback too many on this crummy, barf-y disappointment of a morning.

A rush of cold water swallowed her ankles, shocking her out of her melancholy. Without realizing it, she had wandered closer to the shore, her gaze drifting out toward the horizon without really seeing. The shock of soggy socks turned her wistfulness back into irritation, and she backed away from the surf.

Her foot snagged one a piece of buried garbage, and she planted onto her bottom just in time for another wave to come and swallow her up to her waist. Even on such a warm day, the ocean was cold, and it soaked through everything in an instant, making her squall at the sudden freeze that clung to every inch of her.

Anger and frustration exploded through the crumbling walls of her patience. "Oh, come on!" she snarled at the thing that had tripped her, a broken plastic shovel from some long-lost beach toy set. She kicked at the plastic nub in the sand, and at the wave rushing up behind it to soak her with its encore.

The air folded itself into a sharp crease starting at the sole of Connie's shoe. She could see the shape of the blast outlined in the sea spray as a wedge of air carved through the sand and split the wave in half. Water rolled up to either side of her while the offending plastic tumbled into the ocean, leaving a glittering contrail of sand behind it.

Connie stared at her own foot hovering in front of her. Another wave rolled up and soaked through her, but she didn't notice. She watched the foot plop into the water and then reappear as the wave receded. A few stray bubbles clung to the shoelace.

Furiously, Connie rolled onto her back and began kicking at the ocean. Her feet pumped, and she grunted in rhythm, putting everything her legs had into the effort. Wind! she screamed in her head. Wind! Wind! Wind! The word rattled her brain with each kick. But the only air she stirred was the frantic breath heaving in her chest. Her arms and legs collapsed, and she squeezed her eyes shut, letting a fresh wave roll over all of her. It hid the frustrated tears beading at the crease of her eyes.

Not having any powers would be okay. After all, she had lived without powers her entire life. Just like she had lived her entire life without a second person inside of her. But having those powers, having them because that person was gone, and not being able to control them… It was more than Connie could bear. She hated being a danger to the people around her. She hated knowing that she could do more, but not being able to.

And to what prodigious end would you employ my powers, human? Would you fly a kite? Spin a pinwheel? Dry that mass of keratin hanging off your scalp?

It wasn't Jade. She knew that. But she couldn't help imagining the snarky Gem's sub-vocalizations as she lay in the surf. Jade would have choice words for her self-pitying. But she didn't. Because of Connie. And now all Connie could do was to clench her fist, knuckles sinking into the foamy sand under the sweep of another wave that swallowed her. She could feel her hand shaking with the force of her disappointment.

Shaking and…frothing?

As the wave receded again, Connie looked over at her fist and realized that she couldn't completely close her fingers. Something pressed back against her grip. It felt like a stress ball without the ball, or like gelatin that refused to squish. And when the water came back, it rippled away from her hand, bubbling and jumping as if at a boil, but without any heat. When she let go of her grip, and the boiling became a blast that sprayed her in the face.

Eyes wide, Connie scrambled to her feet and stared at her hands. Her fists opened and closed as fast as her fingers could move, but nothing more like that squishing sensation returned.

"Come on," she growled. "Come on!" She reached again for that feeling of disappointment, but her own excitement worked against her. So she tried imagining the disappointed voice again instead, conjuring it wholesale. Wiggle your fingers, human. You look like a stage illusionist attempting a tutorial on TubeTube, her imagined Jade taunted her.

And like that, it came back. She felt resistance as she squeezed, and held onto the feeling. The very air in her hands rippled with pressure, making the sight of her fingers waver. And when she relaxed her grasp, the little crushes of air burst outward, kicking her palms down and knocking her back a step.

She had grabbed the air.

She had GRABBED the AIR!

Those months of living with a second set of emotions inside of her head had made Connie well-practiced in compartmentalizing her feelings. And now, half-hollow as she was, she had plenty of space in which to work. So she took that despair, that disappointment, frustration, and sadness, and she let it stew in the ache of the emptiness. Then she let the cocktail of feelings seep into her hands. And then she squeezed hard.

Strong pressure pushed back against the insides of her fists, to the point where her fingertips couldn't touch her palms. Little jets of air skittered out between her fingers as she shook with the effort. And when she let go again, twin bursts of air made her stagger backwards, throwing her hair behind her like a wet curtain.

For a moment, Connie could only stand there, staring at her wind-dry hands. Everything else about her still drizzled from the fresh, cold ocean soaked through her clothes. Slowly, a triumphant smile pushed up through her shock. She laughed.

She could squeeze the air. It was a far cry from summoning a hurricane, but it was a start.

But what was her limit? How hard could she actually squeeze? She clapped her hands together and trapped a bubble of misery between her palms. That misery coalesced into a ball of writhing, seething air that tried to force her arms apart. She gritted her teeth and hunched over, pressing inward with everything she had, and pouring every nasty thought she could muster into her fingers.

The rippling air grew, first into the size of a golf ball, then into the size of a baseball, and then, a basketball. It looked like a round mirage trembling under her fingertips.

Connie shrieked in delight. The noise came out of her, half a laugh and half a sob, and the breath of it joined her roiling ball, making it larger still. She was actually using a Gem power on purpose! She—

She lost her grip on the ball.

When Connie staggered through the house's door, she found the other Gems there with Steven, standing in quiet conference around the coffee table. Somber faces broke from the conversation to look at her. She met their stares with a wide, wild grin that didn't care how much her face hurt.

A flash of light swallowed Garnet's fists into her gauntlets. Pearl's eyes widened, and her stone flashed with the end of her spear, which she swept into her hands. "Connie! Are you alright? Were you attacked?" Pearl cried.

"Tell us who did this to you," Garnet said. A dangerous edge lay in the tenor of her voice.

Their fierceness caught Connie off-guard. She bit her lip in concern, and tasted copper. Surprised, she touched her lips and saw her fingertips come back red. Her nose was throbbing from the accidental explosion she had set off between her hands, but she hadn't realized it was bleeding, too. "Oh, right. It looks worse than it hurts," she told them.

"That's a relief," said Amethyst. She still lounged on the couch, seemingly unconcerned with the rough state of Connie. "It looks like somebody tried to eat you and gave up halfway through."

Connie craned her neck to look at the rest of herself. Soaked from head to toe, crusty with sand, with raw scrapes on her knees and elbows, and a bloody nose painting her chin red, Connie had to admit she was a fright. If she had walked into her own house looking like this, her mother would have already called an ambulance. Thankfully, adrenaline and excitement made for a swell anesthetic.

"Connie," Steven began, "we should—"

"Okay, yeah, but Steven: look!" Connie brushed past his concerned look and stood between the Gems. Squatting low, she cupped her hands before her. This time she grabbed at a much smaller patch of air, and a deep breath through her nose gave her a blossoming pain that helped channel her frustrations into the creation of a new rippling mass of air pressure.

"Whoa!" Amethyst jumped from the couch and stuck her face next to the ripple in Connie's grasp. "That's so cool! It's like some kind of anime power, or something. Can you make your hair blond and spiky too?"

Steven pulled Amethyst back before the purple Gem could stick her nose into the ripple. But he too crouched down to examine Connie's new discovery. "You're really doing it," he whispered, his breath tickling her knuckles.

Carefully, Connie drew the ball back and then eased her shaking palms apart, letting the pressure dissipate as she let out a sigh. "It's still really hard to do, and even harder to control. Earlier I kind of knocked myself silly on accident," she said, and pointed to her swollen nose. "But I'm okay now."

Amethyst grinned and bopped Connie on the shoulder. "You're more than okay. You're awesome! What do you call those little ripple-doodles? Air bombs? Air grenades? Gren-air-ds? No, that last one only really works on the page."

"Well done," Garnet said, rewarding Connie with a slight tilt of the head.

"Well done, indeed!" sang Pearl, clasping her hands together. Then she caught a meaningful look from Steven, and her excitement shrank. "Erm, but we do still have something to discuss. Steven, I believe you wanted to start?"

The concerned expression on Steven deflated Connie's smile. She swiped at her face with the back of her fist, but only managed to spread the sticky feeling across her face in a streak she could see Steven's eyes follow. "It's great that you figured out your air-ball-thing," he said, and offered her a grimace that was probably meant to be a smile.

"…but?" Connie prompted him.

"But," he admitted, "I'm really worried about you. You're pushing yourself too hard."

Protest welled inside of her, threatening to spill into a new windcident, but she tamped it down before it could escape. "I've already learned so much. And it's not even lunchtime yet!" she argued.

Steven opened his mouth to retort, but closed it when Pearl rested a hand on his shoulder. The pale Gem's face went stony, and she snapped, "Connie: Form Three. Go."

Connie's body took over for her sluggish mind, pushing her through the movements of Pearl's training form. Repetition had imprinted the dance-like pattern into Connie's limbs, and thanks to the previous sword ban by her mother, she was accustomed to practicing with an empty hand instead of a sword. But after three moves, Connie's legs wobbled, and no amount of muscle memory could keep her from collapsing onto the floor.

As Connie winced and hissed, Pearl helped her to her feet again. "You were performing that sequence flawlessly by your third week," Pearl reminded her. "Of course, you were a bit dryer the last time you tried it."

"Okay, yeah," Connie grunted, ducking her head to hide her embarrassment. "But—"

Steven stepped forward and caught her in a hug, pressing close as he wrapped his arms around her shoulders. "You have time," he told her, his voice low but firm. "You have all the time you need. I know it doesn't feel like it, but it's true."

Closing her eyes, Connie rested her chin in the crook of his neck, letting herself sag into his embrace because it felt nice, but also because she was exhausted, and standing had become a lot more work as her adrenaline high faded. "You've never been in school, Steven. Summer never lasts as long as you want it to."

"It'll last longer than you do at this rate," Garnet noted.

"I'm not telling you to stop," Steven promised her. She could feel him grin, knew the shape of that smile as his cheek pressed to hers. "Just…ease up on yourself. After all, I found some of my powers just by hanging out with you. It might work both ways, don't you think?"

Her tired arms rose and circled him. "Using a hug is cheating," she mumbled into his shoulder.

She felt his smile widen against her cheek. "I'm just using everything I've got to be the best coach I can be. Speaking of which…"

Steven licked his fingertips and pressed them gently into her neck. A tingling warmth flooded her body, creating ecstasy out of the sheer absence of pain and cold that his healing powers banished. Awash in the tingle, Connie couldn't help but think how much easier it would have been for him to kiss her cheek instead. Then the warmth doubled, and she was certain it wasn't from the healing magic.

"And, you know, practice wasn't the biggest thing that helped me find my powers anyway. It was spending time with these guys," Steven continued as he stepped back and gestured to the other Gems. "We've been talking about it, and we all agreed that you need some one-on-one time with everybody."

The warmth receded from all but Connie's cheeks. "That's really kind of you. I know how important your patrols are with those other Gems still out there."

"This is important too," Garnet told her.

Amethyst winked. "We'll get that rock in you working in no time."

"And of course, we'll continue your other training. It'll help keep you sharp," Pearl added, and also tried to wink, which came across more like a failed attempt at blinking. Then she frowned and asked, "Was that okay? I don't do puns very often. It didn't feel right."

Steven gestured up toward the loft, producing the television remote from his back pocket. "Right now, your coach is assigning you some important new drills: there's a marathon of Under the Knife this afternoon, and I don't want to see you try anything else until you give me five episodes. Er, after you get cleaned up," he added, and watched Pearl produce a fluffy white towel from the glow of her gemstone.

Connie accepted the towel from Pearl, and offered them all a wan smile before she made for the bathroom to make herself livable again. She knew they were worried about her, just like her parents had been worried about her. They were probably right to worry, and she loved them all for it.

But as she clenched her hand, feeling the ripple of air pressure building against her palm underneath the drape of the towel, she reveled in the new truth of that day. What had manifested this new breakthrough wasn't Steven's coaching, or any amount of practice or wishing. It had been Connie plunging herself into misery and frustration. Those feelings were fueling the ripple of air gathered in her hands.

Those feelings were what Jade's gemstone demanded. Whether it was penance for failing to save Jade, or punishment for being the human who had ended Jade, Connie couldn't know. But she knew what the stone demanded now. And she had the empty space where Jade had been inside of her to hide those feelings away from the others, so they wouldn't worry.

She smiled, and buried those feelings away where no one could see them, where they would fuel Jade's gemstone.

Chapter Text

Never before had Connie felt so reluctant to shoot through the glowing tunnel of a warp pad. Such trips had once been the highlight of her week, such as when Pearl or Steven would warp her up to the Sky Arena. But today, she would rather have been doing anything but. Even gym class would have been a better alternative. Gym class didn't make her stomach churn with dread. Mostly. As much.

She and Steven appeared in their destination and were rushed by the smell of pollen and soil. The world around them stood lush with greenery, a field of tall stalks topped with soft yellow tassels. Next to the field stood its boxy fortress, where scrap metal had been bolted over old red paint and cracked wood to turn a barn into a stalwart haven. A gentle breeze stirred past her cheek on its way to the field, where it rippled through the corn, turning the crop into a waving ocean of gold.

It was only after her sneakers crunched onto the barnyard that Connie remembered the scores and scores of land mines that lay buried throughout the farm. She winced with her whole body, waiting to see if she exploded. Moments later, when she didn't, she sagged in relief.

"Steven! Connie Jade!" Peridot called to them from the mouth of the barn fortress. The little green engineer scampered across the yard with the kind of fearlessness Connie did not normally associate with people who lived on top of minefields. Behind the Gem trundled a rusty garbage can riding atop a set of caterpillar treads that framed the bottom of its canister.

"Hey, Peridot!" called Steven, jumping off the pad with his own landmine-scoffing courage. "This place looks great! Are those new rivets around the doors?"

The Gem whirled back toward the barn and cupped her hands to her mouth. "Ha! I told you somebody would notice, Lapis! And barely off the pad, too!"

Connie followed the direction of Peridot's gloating up to the corner of the barn roof. There, she saw Lapis sitting at the edge, her head and shoulders hunched over an open book in her lap. Even from this distance Connie could see the Gem's eyes rolling at Peridot. But then that blue gaze fell upon Connie and froze. Without a word, Lapis snapped out her wings and dropped from the roof, loop-de-looping through the door to the barn's loft.

It was exactly the reaction Connie had expected, and feared, and probably deserved, and it made her stomach churn harder. The feeling steeped her, draining slowly into her half-hollow.

"Ha! She's speechless with her own wrongness," Peridot crowed. When she glanced back and saw Connie eyeballing the ground beneath them, she waved off the wordless concern. "Oh, don't worry. We got tired of being so careful with where we walked—and un-glooping the Campers whenever they glitched off a safe path." She slapped the side of her garbage can affectionately. "So now all the farm's defenses are on standby. I retrofitted them with transmitters so I can prime them remotely from my command center!"

She pointed to the amalgamation of scrap built at the edge of the field. It featured a satellite dish made of old pie tins, and a mechanical typewriter jammed into its side beneath a cluster of old CRT televisions that served as monitors. Connie was forced to admit that, compared to most of Peridot's other inventions, it did appear somewhat commanding. "How did you network the mines? Did you have to build all those transmitters from scratch?" asked Connie.

Peridot's grin widened. "No, that's the best part! I opened a bunch of new accounts with some terrestrial communication provider, and they supplied me with one new communicator for each instance! Now I have hundreds! Show them, Nikki."

She gestured to the garbage can, who obediently tilted forward and disgorged an avalanche of smart phones from under its lid. The black screens piled up between its treads into a small, expensive mountain of technology.

A look of concern bounced between Connie and Steven. "Peridot, did you pay for all of these?" Steven asked.

Snorting, Peridot scoffed, "Of course! You think I don't understand your planet's primitive economics? Your barter-by-proxy use of fungible chits is utter simplicity to a Gem as advanced as I!"

"I think some of that meant 'yes,'" Steven said, sounding uncertain. "So, great! But where did you get all that money? My dad?"

"No, he put all project funding on hiatus after the setback of Camp Crystal Gem," admitted Peridot. "But no matter! I found an unlisted data page on the human network that serves as a repository for credit codes. I should forward you the network address. This Anarchist's Piggybank has a wealth of information I previously assumed to be confidential!"

Steven blanched as he pivoted to Connie, and his cheery tone pitched an octave higher into panic. "Okay, so that sounds like credit card fraud and identity theft. Which, now that we know about it, makes us…?"

"Accessories after the fact." Connie's voice emerged as barely a squeak. She was paralyzed with horror at the prospect of being made a criminal. Her dreams of holding public office were over before they had ever begun, because surely no criminal could get herself elected. Then again, her father did mutter about crooks in office whenever he watched the evening news. But she would have to learn how to cover up a dark, sordid, illicit past now that she accidentally had one.

The moral conundrum must have been obvious on her face, because Steven's hand slipped into hers and gave it a squeeze, becoming the anchor that kept her from spiraling away. "Let's put a pin in that. Maybe forever. And hope it never comes up again," said Steven. "Peridot, when you need money, ask me, and I'll ask my dad. No more web numbers."

The engineer rolled her eyes. "Much more cumbersome, but fine. So, did you only come here to curtail my progress?"

Steven kept his hand in Connie's, and she let him draw her along as Peridot led them toward the armored barn. "Actually, we thought maybe you could help out with a problem Connie's been having. We're in Gem training, but looking for something a little more, ah, low-impact for today."

Connie's pride wanted her to argue again, but the ache in her hamstrings told her to keep quiet.

Peridot's eyes rolled further still. "Of course. Stars forbid you visit because you want to see us."

His features crumpled. "Oh, I'm sorry, Peridot! Of course we want to see you! Do you want to hang out—"

"That's sweet of you, Steven, but I'm far too busy," Peridot interrupted, puffing with self-importance. "However, I'm always happy to assist with Connie Jade's transition into demi-Gemhood. What seems to be the problem?"

"It's—" Steven began, but then yelped as his sandaled toes banged into something shiny and oblong just inside the barn doors. The object skittered to a halt in front of them, revealing itself to be a segmented, swiveling joint capped by a pointy boot. It looked almost like the leg of some medieval suit of armor crafted from a bunch of inside-out coffee cans that had been welded together.

As Steven hopped, Peridot gestured at the curio. Her ferrokinesis carried it back to the workbench from where it must have fallen. "Pardon the mess. I tend to get disorganized during the alpha stage of my more exciting projects. It stimulates creativity. You were saying?"

A glance told Connie that Steven, watery-eyed, was still beyond speech. "It's my booking. My reading powers? Everything I read, or see on TV, or on any kind of screen, it ends up burned into my brain."

"That's wonderful progress!" exclaimed Peridot.

"No," Connie insisted, "it isn't. I keep memorizing billboards and commercials and websites. Do you know what the top Gaggle search results for 'hyperthymesia' are? Because I do, and I will forever."

"Hmm. I hadn't considered the sheer amount of nonsense information this planet generates. But there are solutions we can explore." Peridot drew Connie away from Steven to stand by the workbench. With a few light touches, the Gem directed her patient to stand upright with her arms lowered and her chin lifted. "Let's start simple. Close your eyes."

Connie complied.

"Good. Now, place your palms tightly over your ears," she heard Peridot say.

Frowning, she cupped her hands to the sides of her head. The ambient noises of the farm disappeared, replaced with the thrum of her own pulse echoing in her hands.

"Can you discern anything, Connie Jade?" Peridot asked loudly.

"Not really," Connie answered, also loud as she spoke to hear herself.

"Success!" crowed Peridot. "Whenever you don't want to catalogue something, just do that!"

Connie's eyes opened into a scowl as she dropped her hands. "I can't live with my eyes closed and my fingers in my ears!"

"It was just an early attempt. We'll refine our methods," Peridot assured her, lifting her hands in a calming gesture. The Gem's gaze wandered about the room for a moment, and then brightened. "Aha! Follow me!" She scampered to the ladder at the back of the barn and climbed.

Glancing at Steven, Connie saw him with weight back on his injured foot and a semi-encouraging smile on his face. Unconvinced, she followed anyway, climbing into the barn's loft.

The loft was almost as spartan as the rest of the refitted barn, though cozier. It now played home to all of the creature comforts that Lapis and Peridot enjoyed. An old patchwork couch and a new-ish television took up most of the space, but a little bookcase had been added to the corner, with paperbacks and manga and hardcovers stacked haphazardly on its shelves. A beanbag chair was piled next to the bookcase, and a splash of bright blue was sprawled across the beanbag with a pumpkin in her lap and a book propped over the gourd.

As Connie's eyes broke above the edge of the loft, she saw Lapis reeling back at the sight of her. The Gem fell backwards out of the beanbag with an eep, and Pumpkin catapulted out of her skirt. Before Connie's hands even touched the loft floor, Lapis was out the window in a blur of wings, absconding with her book and leaving poor Pumpkin spinning on the floor, yelping in confused alarm.

Connie grimaced at the hasty exit, but tried to pretend like she hadn't noticed as Steven hobbled up the ladder after her. Lapis avoiding her meant that Connie got a stay of unpleasantness. That would be a problem for later. Or never. Better never, if they could keep up this avoidance.

Then Peridot caught their attention again. The Gem had stuffed her entire upper half into the cushions of the couch, her legs wiggling in the air as she hunted for something. A muffled triumphant cry emerged through the upholstery, and then Peridot emerged holding her prize above her head. "Behold, the tool by which Connie Jade shall master this facet of her new self!"

"Oh, hey," said Steven, "it's the old hand-me-down tablet I got from my dad that I hand-me-down'd to you!"

Peridot cradled the glossy, thin screen with a surprising amount of reverence. "Correct. And now I'm hand-me-down-ing it to Connie Jade. I've crafted a particular application into this device with the express purpose of data recall. I just never imagined anyone else would have such a use for it." She thumbed one of the glowing app icons on the screen before passing the device to Connie.

When Connie rotated the screen, she found video files arrayed in tidy rows. As quickly as her eyes could focus, she memorized the name of every file onscreen. Each name started with a production number and finished with a corny title like "Where The Red Pine Grows" or "Canoe Please Not Right Now?"

"Wait a minute. Is this a show?" Connie said.

Peridot vibrated with excitement. "It's the complete series of Camp Pining Hearts! I obtained this version from a different unlisted network address—which I will also share, you're welcome—so the subtitles are burned into each episode with multiple human dialects. The translation context makes for a slightly different experience, but it's still an acceptable means by which to consume the show."

"And this will help me control my booking, how?" drawled Connie.

Another deft green touch opened the first file on the pad in Connie's hands. Immediately, a bootlegged video player app launched, and with a few more swipes by Peridot, the screen began to flash with fast-motion images of vintage Canadian teenagers. Though soundless, the episode was accompanied by a stack of three different subtitles, only one of which Connie could understand. In less than thirty seconds, Connie had forever absorbed the pilot episode of Camp Pining Hearts, minus the bits she had missed whenever she blinked.

Peridot waited until after the credits were done before she said, "Take the pad with you, and watch a number of episodes each day. Rewatch them when you're done and see if you experience anything different. Try to control when or how you absorb what you watch. With practice, and using something familiar, you should be able to adapt your use of 'booking' to be active when and where you choose. Oh!" Peridot straightened, becoming grave as she added, "This part's really important: report back to me which pairing you believe is the most optimal. But be careful, because if you don't say Pierre and Percy, you'll be objectively wrong."

Connie stared hard at the grim little Gem. Her eyes narrowed, and she said, "I feel like this is just your way of getting me to binge your favorite show."

"It can be two things!" Peridot insisted shrilly. Then she looked down, scuffing her foot against the floor as she demurred, "I mean, I suppose the exact media is irrelevant to you practice, if for some reason you object to watching the best show ever, using an experience I curated expressly for the purpose of sharing the show with the people whose opinions I value the most…"

Sufficiently guilted, Connie heaved a sigh and tucked the pad under her arm. "Sure. I can watch a couple of episodes every day, especially if I can get through them so qui—"

"Huzzah!" Peridot cheered, leaping with her fists pumped above her bushy hair. Then she hurriedly regained her composure, coughing into her fist. "That is to say: excellent. I've no doubt that this exercise will prove beneficial to your training."

"I actually read some stories the other day that paired Gwen and David," Steven piped up. "They were pretty good."

"Those two new counselors they added to the show in its final season? Preposterous." A look of scorn filled Peridot's visor. "I've tracked down every iota of media released by Maple Poutine Ltd., the studio that produced the show, and the tie-in material, and even the serialized adventures printed on the boxes of those licensed CPH-brand prepackaged whittling sticks that ended up bankrupting them. There's nothing at all officially released to suggest that Gwen and David are together."

"Oh, not officially. It was just some fan fiction I found," Steven explained.

"Fan fiction?" Peridot echoed, her mouth clumsy around the unfamiliar words.

"Sure. Stories that fans write," he said. "Sometimes they continue the story, or branch off into alternate timelines or settings. A lot of them plug the characters into high school. Those are fun!"

A cloud of cell phones appeared from all directions to swarm Steven, held aloft in the invisible grip of ferrokinesis guided by wide, manic green eyes. The little bricks of technology emerged from tool boxes, cabinets, from atop workbenches, out of overturned crates, and even from between the cushions of the same couch that had produced the tablet. They all streaked through the air and began to orbit Steven, trapping him behind a piecemeal black mirror.

Then the screens parted to allow Peridot through. One by one, they lit with different websites, bathing Steven in a harsh glow that made him flinch as Peridot's voice emerged from behind the light in a low, deadly rasp. "Show me," she demanded. "Show me everything. Now."

Connie backed slowly away as the cloud of phones closed around the pair. She caught a glimpse of Steven's eyes pleading for help, but even Connie's heroic impulses had their limits. One such limit, it turned out, came before a deluge of amateur literature obsessed with the imaginary love lives of fictional characters in a Canadian teen dramedy. She mouthed I'm sorry to him, and then crept back down the ladder.

The guilty satisfaction she felt at her escape lasted only until she stepped out of the barn and back into the sunlight, and immediately came face to face with Lapis. The blue Gem lounged at the edge of their deep water pit, her feet submerged, her book open in her lap. Her fingers hung in mid-turn of a page as she stared back at Connie, motionless and looking silently terrified.

This exact moment had been Connie's dread for weeks, and exactly why she had been so anxious about visiting the farm. She hadn't seen or heard from Lapis since the Battle of Ascension. She hadn't been there when Lapis had to find out what had happened to Jade. And though she knew she should have, Connie had never asked after the Gem or how she had handled her friend's…absence.

At first Connie's grief had given her an excuse. When that had gone on for too long, Connie took to imagining that Lapis would want space and distance to process the loss. And by the time that was no longer plausible, an uncomfortable amount of time had passed, too much time for Connie to feel like she could explain away. She wasn't sure what the right thing might be to say to Lapis, but she was sure that nothing was the worst thing she could have come up with, and that's what she had done: nothing.

Lapis and Jade had been close, or as close as a former Homeworld prisoner could be to a former Homeworld solider. Connie had just been the human stuck between them, rarely a help in bringing them together, more often a meddler, a third wheel, and an unwilling jailer. She could only imagine what Jade had told of her to the other Gem in their chats and emails.

Now Jade was gone, and it was Connie's fault. How was Connie supposed to face Lapis after that? What could she say after so long a silence? Sorry your friend vanished so her human prison got to live. Wanna catch the new Dogcopter movie next month?

She wouldn't blame Lapis for hating her. She just couldn't stand the idea of seeing that hate up close.

"H-Hi, Lapis," Connie stammered, and tried to smile.

Her voice jolted Lapis out of her stupor. The Gem yelped, and the book jounced out of her hands. She bobbled it once, twice, and lost it over the middle of the pool. Connie's heart leapt at the thought of the book, any book, being dunked and sunk. But a seemingly solid hand made of water reached out of the pool's surface and caught the book by the spine, snapping it closed and handing it back to Lapis before a single drop could sully its pages. Only a harmless glimmering of dew remained on the faux leather cover.

"Hi, um, Connie," Lapis said, curling her legs up out of the pool and under her skirt.

As her bibliophile's terror faded, Connie recognized the book Lapis was holding. It was one of Connie's own, after all. "Oh! That's Twenty Thousand Leagues, isn't it?" she said.

"Yeah," Lapis said, hiding behind her bangs as she studied the book in her lap.

Connie hadn't missed the book when she had read her entire house the week before. But searching her memory now, she couldn't feel that particular volume inside of her. "Second time?" she echoed.

"It's confusing, but I like it," said Lapis. A smile tugged at her lips, and her eyes went faraway with a look Connie knew too well. Rereading a book, getting lost in a familiar story, was one of the best feelings in the world. "I like Captain Nemo. He's free to go anywhere, and he's good to his friends, and he lives underwater. But he's so angry at so many people, and I'm not completely sure why."

That much Connie remembered without the text already living in her brain. "A lot of it's historical. Verne was drawing from England and its…" She watched the Gem's brows knit in confusion, and tried again. "Um, Nemo was angry at a country…a bunch of humans who were trying to control everyone. They were kind of like Earth's own Diamonds. And when he meets any of those humans, or anybody like them, he goes kind of crazy, and, well, a lot of people end up underwater. Which is bad, what with the breathing."

Realization trickled into Lapis' features. "Oh, I get it! Nemo was basically his own kind of Crystal Gem! Wow, I don't know if that makes me like him less or more." She scoffed, but then her eyes flicked back to Connie, and her smirk faded. "Anyway, I guess you want it back now, since, well…"

"Oh." Connie winced, and her eyes prickled. But she held out her hand and forced herself to smile. "Sure. Thanks for taking such good care of it."

She wanted to say so much more, but didn't. Lapis had been betrayed by Homeworld, and Jasper, and even the Crystal Gems. She had spent ages trapped just like Jade, except without any kind of Connie to advocate for her. Trust didn't come easy to Lapis, and if the Gem didn't feel ready for more connections—or, more likely, if she just didn't want to be friends with the dumb human tagalong that had gotten stuck in the middle of her real friendship with Jade—then Connie could understand. She just wished that understanding made her feel better about it.

Lapis started to hand the book over, but then pulled back, hesitating. "Look, can I just say…? Ugh, I suck at this," Lapis groaned, and bit her lip. She trembled, rumbled, and then finally exploded, "I'm sorry you don't want to be friends! There. I said it." And she thrust the book out dejectedly.

Connie couldn't lift her hand, and left the book hanging. Her mouth opened several times before she finally managed to say, "Buh-wha?"

Shoulders sagging, Lapis groaned, "After the time we spent together trying to help Jade, I thought maybe I had made another friend. But then, after Jade was gone, and you didn't visit or screen-mail thing me, I…" Her hand trembled around the book until she hugged it to her chest. "I get it, you know? I'm just some other Gem that Steven knows. I'm not even one of the Crystal Gems, like Peridot is. I just wish—"

"I still want to be friends!"

The words burst out of Connie, knocking Lapis back a step and forcing the Gem onto the pond, where she bobbed gently as her soles rode the ripple of the water. "R-Really?" Lapis squeaked.

Connie still fumbled around the thoughts colliding in her head. "You want to be my friend?" she said.

"Of course!" Lapis exclaimed. "You're so nice! You worked so hard to help Jade when she was stuck in you. And you understand Gem stuff and human stuff, like with that Captain Nemo thing. Peridot had no idea what I was talking about when I tried to tell her. Steven has trouble explaining Earth stuff to me sometimes, even, but you? And…

Eyes cast down into the waters beneath her, Lapis dropped her voice to a murmur. "And you're not afraid of me. Sometimes Steven's friends, and the humans we know, they all look at me like I'm a disaster waiting to happen. Which, yeah, I kind of am, since I was before. Steven and Peridot don't treat me like that, and when you didn't either… It meant a lot to me."

Connie stepped to the edge of the pond. "But I thought you hated me! You should hate me. I'm the reason Jade isn't here anymore," Connie said, choking at the last.

"But I thought Jade gave up her physical form. Didn't she?" Lapis said, confused. When Connie nodded, Lapis shook her head. "Even with Jade living inside of you, you couldn't do that for her. Jade did that. It would be like if I breathed or ate food for you. Right?" She chuckled a little at her own musing.

Connie couldn't help but chuckle too. "Maybe I don't understand all Gem stuff as much as I should. But can we still be friends?"

Lapis' smile became genuine, and a little sad. "I would like that. I think I need all the friends I can find."

"Me too." Connie matched the smile with one of her own.

Brightening, Lapis asked, "Do you have one of those screen-mails like Jade had? We could write to each other! I like doing that. It lets me think about what I want to say before I say it. Oh, hang on! Peridot gave me a bunch of those little devices. She said I could use screen-mail on them. I'll go get an extra one so you have something to write me with!"

Before Connie could protest that she already had a smartphone, and a laptop, the blue Gem was airborne and darting into the barn's loft. A wave of warm relief spread through Connie's middle as she grinned up at the departing Gem.

That relief lasted only as long as it took for Peridot's shrill voice to reach her from the barn doors. "Connie Jade! Connie Jade!" the little engineer called as she emerged. "Steven and I need you to settle an argument. Or rather, I need you to agree with me. There is no way that an American comedy web series remake loosely based off the unaired pilot of a failed Camp Pining Hearts spinoff counts as canon. Even if Camp Camp and CPH characters have a couple of the same names—"

"You don't have to call me that anymore, you know."

Connie hadn't meant to say it out loud. She didn't realize that she had spoken until she saw Peridot stop dead in her tracks. "What?" said the engineer.

"You don't have to call me 'Connie Jade' anymore," Connie muttered. "After all, Jade is…gone."

"WHAT?" Peridot's shriek made Connie spin around. She staggered as the little Gem leapt onto her, planting a foothold at either side of Connie's hips and grasping the collar of her T-shirt. The motion stretched the fabric halfway down Connie's chest, exposing the green stone and a flash of white bralette underneath.

"Get off!" Connie slapped Peridot off of her, as much out of surprise as anger. As she gathered her shirt collar in her fist, her face burned with embarrassment. If Steven had been there to see, Connie might have died, though only after killing Peridot first.

But in spite of the unknown near brush with death, Peridot looked relieved from where she lay in the dirt. "Oh, thank the stars. You're still all there," she sighed, and pointed to the gemstone peering out through the stretched collar.

As Connie tried to rearrange her shirt back into decency, she growled, "Of course the stone is still there, you maniac! But Jade isn't in it anymore!"

Worry lines filled Peridot's visor above her large, sad eyes. Rising up, she dusted off her legs and said, "Jade isn't gone."

Those words punched Connie right in the pit of her stomach. "…what?"

"Yes, the memories and experiences formerly inhabiting your gemstone are no longer present. A second personality no longer cohabitates your singular form. That so much knowledge, so much history, is lost to us is a tragedy," Peridot admitted, her chin falling to her chest. Then, with a deep breath, she looked back up and explained, "But the things that made her special are all there, encoded into the stone. Her tenacity, her brilliance, her indomitable will, everything that shaped the individual she became, are all now a part of the individual who still remains. That's you."

Connie felt her eyes prickling again. Her hand drifted from her collar down to the square shape at her throat. "I… Wow. Thanks, Peridot."

For a moment, her half-hollow didn't feel quite so empty.

"It's likely the confusion of your human half, since that's the remaining personality component," Peridot mused. She chuckled, and added, "Luckily, that won't last much longer. Since your cognizance is based around human and Gem physiology now, those traits from the stone will only grow more prominent as your identity adjusts to its new circumstances. Why, you may already be as far removed from your former humanity as Steven is from his Rose Quartz mother!"

And just like that, the moment ended, and Connie felt a million new little fears, and questions, and worries, and existential terrors, all rushing in to be swallowed into the half-hollow.

"…thanks, Peridot," Connie muttered.

"You're welcome, Connie Jade!"

Chapter Text

Cold steel in her hands. A light sweat beading at her brow just beneath the line of her tightly braided hair. Fog surrounding her to hide her opponents. Her heart racing with the thrill of battle.

For one brief, beautiful moment, Connie's messy life had become simple and clean: win or fall. Nothing else mattered.

The sound of footsteps taunted her from the thick of the fog. She thought for a second to close her eyes and let her ears guide her, fighting blind like so many of her favorite fictional warriors would have, but many old bruises and lumps had already taught her to know better. Heroes on the page didn't need to worry about taking a real sword through their fictional guts. Her senses worked better together.

One set of footsteps changed direction and speed, moving at her from behind. Air whistled around the edge of a swinging blade, the sensation of it somehow clearer to Connie than the sound of it. Then the fog burst apart as one of her foes attacked, already swinging a long, thin saber as it emerged from the whorling curtain.

She tamped down on another storybook impulse. Blocking a sword with another sword looked cool in movies, but it chipped or broke blades in real life, especially when the other sword was being wielded by a super-strong alien. Even if the sword didn't break, her noodle-y human arms might crumple under the force of such a blow. Of course, she used to have a sword that could take the abuse. The blade of Rose Quartz: unbreakable, unstoppable, and abandoned by Connie in the Battle of Ascension when—

Connie pushed the thought into her half-hollow. The best way to avoid a sword was to get out of the way. The tricky part came in how close the sword got, and where her feet ended up after it missed.

Ducking, she spun under the oncoming blade. The rush of splitting air coming off her opponent's steel seemed to cry out at her, but she ignored it, and spun her own saber to answer the swing. Where she went low, her opponent went high, flipping over the swipe as though gravity was merely optional to the creature.

The fog broke again as her second attacker tried for her back before Connie's feet could settle. A twin to her other foe, this new attacker swung downward to split Connie down the middle. But Connie had expected the opportunistic strike and kept her body and sword spinning, making the new foe think twice. When Connie stopped her turn, she stood with eyes open, sword raised, and her identical enemies both now revealed and in front of her.

Fighting two opponents didn't scare Connie like it might once have. As they tried to flank her again, she strafed, keeping one behind the other relative to her. The right footwork turned a two-on-one battle into two one-on-one battles, one after the other, and with both opponents fighting to get out of each other's way. If the strategy flustered her opponents, it never showed in their blank faces. Even still, Connie smiled.

Emboldened or impatient, the forward opponent rushed Connie, and its twin charged shortly behind. One swung high, the other, low, working to box Connie in or force her retreat. But Connie was feeling bold and impatient, and rushed to meet the blades.

A heartbeat before being skewered, Connie launched herself through the air like a missile, slipping through the gap between the foes' blades. Her body corkscrewed, and her blade flashed as she passed between the pair. The tip of Connie's braid skipped off the flat of the high attack with a soft tonk as she passed unharmed. Her blade rocked with two impacts.

She landed in a roll, the flagstone hard and cold against her shoulder. Her blade snapped to attention as she tumbled back to her feet, facing the way she had come, ready for a counteroffensive. But the fight was already over, evident in the bright red gash that bisected each twin where her blade had swept through them.

In staggered unison, the Holo-Pearls jerked upright. Their translucent forms ballooned as each one announced, "Defeat: Accepted!" Then they popped, becoming a dwindling blue cloud that dissolved into the mists around them.

A burst of applause lit the fog. "Brava! Well done!" Pearl's words of praise preceded her as she emerged through the gray curtain. The pale Gem swept her hands apart, and the curtain parted, dissipating to reveal the Sky Arena around them. Beyond the white flagstones and the levitating rubble, a crisp blue sky stretched for miles, with a carpet of lush greenery even farther below. "Two opponents at Level Three? Outstanding!"

Warmth filled Connie's cheeks as she grinned. "Thank you, ma'am," she said, and bowed. "Were you able to see the fight through the fog?"

"Well, no," admitted Pearl. "But that's certainly the fastest you've gotten through a low-visibility exercise. You're progressing even faster than you were when we started."

A sliver of guilt pressed into Connie's pride. She knew the sudden leap in her progress came mostly from her new booking ability. Being able to remember every one of Pearl's instructions perfectly, simultaneously, without even trying, was almost like cheating. But it meant she always knew where to put her blade and her feet, making her balance better than it had ever been.

She stuffed the guilt into her half-hollow where it belonged. The undiluted praise made her practically vibrate with excitement. "What's next, ma'am?" she said, bouncing lightly on her toes.

Pearl started to answer, but then paused. She fell into a long silence that eroded the smile out of Connie. As curiosity began to tie knots of anxiety in Connie's chest, her mentor finally said, "Let's sit down for a break."

Those knots in her chest tangled together as Connie followed Pearl to the amphitheater seating of the Arena. A little equipment box tucked behind one of the rows yielded two bottles of water, which were kept perfectly chilled thanks to the altitude. Connie accepted one bottle, twisting off its cap and relishing the relief it spilled through her parched lips. But the anxiety kept knotting tighter and tighter in her chest as she waited for Pearl to speak.

"I've felt we should talk for some time now," Pearl admitted. She stared down at her hands, her thumb worrying at the edge of the water bottle's label. "I kept putting it off, and then your training sessions become much less frequent for a time…"

Of course, Pearl was tiptoeing around the full truth of why those session were so infrequent, because Connie was fragile, and hurting, and could explode into tears if anyone so much as hinted at anything having to do with Jade.

Connie stuffed the ugly little thought into her half-hollow and fought to keep its lingering presence out of her voice. "You kind of sound like you're building up to something bad, ma'am. Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

The question jolted Pearl out of her fidgeting. She smiled, and insisted, "On the contrary! You've progressed faster and farther than I could have imagined when we began. It took me a decade to become as confident with a sword as you are now." Her smile dimmed, and her eyes drifted into her lap. "The truth is, I've run out of fundamentals to teach you."

The knots in Connie's chest wrapped around her heart, seizing it as she whispered, "Does this mean I'm a sword master now?" Her eyes widened at the thought.

But Pearl's laughter dashed the thought immediately. "Oh, goodness, no!" tittered Pearl. "There's always room to improve your basic form, and your speed, and stamina, and precision. You've still only just begun."

"Oh." Now Connie was the one fidgeting with her water bottle, her eyes downcast.

Seeing the effect of her words, Pearl stifled her laugh and said quickly, "What I mean is, this is where the real work begins. Now you have to use your training as a foundation to build your own style of fighting."

Connie's gaze snapped up again, her miffed feelings forgotten. "Really?" she breathed.

In spite of knowing better, she couldn't help but thrill at the idea of joining the likes of the Lonely Blade, or Roronoa Zoro, or any of a dozen other fictitious sword masters from her bookshelf who were renowned for their signature style. Of course she couldn't be a master yet, because real masters forged their own path instead of simply excelling in drills and practice.

Her smile warmed as Pearl nodded in agreement. "I think you're ready to start deciding what kind of fighter you'll become. Understand, this will be much harder than your training up to this point," she said, growing serious with her warning. Even still, a hint of a smile remained through the guise.

Connie's brow crinkled. "Why did you sound nervous about telling me this?" she asked.

"I was uncertain," Pearl admitted, and was quick to add, "not of you, but of me. After all, you're my first student. I tried teaching Steven once before, but he lost interest after he saw me being stabbed."

"I can see how that would be discouraging," Connie said, and cringed.

"I want to give you the help you need. And going forward, I might not always know what that is," Pearl confessed. "It's a bit daunting."

Connie felt some of that uncertainty as she watched Pearl fiddling with the bottle label again. It wasn't often that she saw this more vulnerable side of her mentor. Pearl was an immortal warrior, a veteran of an impossible war from before the dawn of human civilization. How could anything she did for Connie matter so much in her endless life? Yet here was Pearl, fretting all the same.

"Have you ever felt like this when it comes to helping Steven with his Gem stuff?" Connie asked.

Pearl scoffed. "Of course not. I've always known that with enough time and love, Steven's development would happen in due time. You're his best friend, so surely you already knew that. You tell each other everything."

Connie's expression went sly. "Nothing here gets back to him. What happens in the Arena stays in the Arena," she promised, and raised a hand to seal her solemn pledge.

Sagging, Pearl threw back her head and groaned. "I was in a constant state of terror that I would say or do something to destroy his future! It seemed like there was some new calamity popping up every eleven minutes to turn our lives into pure chaos! Thank the stars Greg had him for his pre-talking era. It was already confusing enough not understanding what he needed when he could tell us himself!"

Connie tried and failed to hide her laugh. "But you got through it," she noted.

"Barely, but yes," Pearl agreed. "We just did our best and hoped it would work out."

Hesitating only a second, Connie rested a hand on Pearl's arm, drawing the Gem out of her fretful recollections. "And it did work out. Just like it will work out with me."

She had no idea if her words were true, but she so badly wanted to believe them. And seeing the smile returning to Pearl's features convinced Connie that it had been the right thing to say nonetheless. But the Gem's smile didn't last long.

"There is another issue, if we're going to start developing your style. How we proceed will depend on your weapon of choice. And, well…"

And Connie had trained with the sword of Rose Quartz. The blade that had carved a whole planet from the Diamonds' grasp. The blade Connie had abandoned—

She stuffed the thought into her half-hollow, making room for more useful notions once it was buried. "What about a Gem weapon? Could I summon one? Do I have one?" she asked.

Pearl tapped the water bottle to her chin in thought, leaving a thin beard of condensation beneath her lip as she did. "Every Gem is created with whatever she needs to fulfill her intended purpose," Pearl explained. "If Steven is any indicator, you'll have whatever Jade had."

Nodding, Connie felt her lips twisting, as if torn between a smile or a grimace. There was nothing wrong with her inheriting Jade's sailcloth, although the thought of trying to fly with the kind of control she had demonstrated over her winds made her stomach drop. And it still didn't solve the issue of her needing a new weapon. "I guess I can't change what Jade was made with," she said, and sighed.

"That isn't necessarily true," Pearl said, surprising her. "It's a part of you. A part of your purpose. So, if you can change your purpose—which is very, very, very difficult for a Gem—then that part of you can change as well. But it's an incredibly rare feat. Only one Gem we know of has ever managed it." At this last piece, Pearl's chin lifted in an unmistakable look of pride.

Her excitement revivified, Connie said, "But it can be changed."

Smirking, Pearl leapt from her seat to the Arena floor, the motion all fluid, effortless grace. One hand tossed the bottle she had been fiddling with, sending it tumbling above her. The other hand touched her glowing gemstone and came back with a spear. The weapon flashed as she spun it in a lazy defensive pattern that still moved faster than anything Connie had ever managed. Then, with a vicious cry, Pearl stabbed forward into empty air. The water bottle dropped from its high arc and landed neatly on the flat of the spearhead.

"No Pearl would ever be made with a weapon in her," Pearl boasted, and waggled her spear. The water inside the bottle sloshed, but the bottle stayed on its perch. "For years I fought using only material weapons. It's how I mastered the sword. But after a long, long time, I found that my desire to protect the one I…the ones I loved," Pearl said, correcting herself quickly, "had given me my spear."

Connie could practically feel the stone at her throat tingling with excitement as she rose to her feet. "What was it before?" she asked.

Embarrassment shone blue in Pearl's cheeks. She snapped her spear back to her side, her hand flicking out as an afterthought to catch the water bottle. "It was a staff. Rather an ornate thing. I was supposed to wave it around when I made proclamations for my…for the 'important' Gems," she admitted, rolling her eyes.

The thought of a bunch of fancy Gems losing their minds over an armed Pearl made Connie giggle. She leapt down to join the Gem, though it took her two or three jumps to equal Pearl's one. "I think I'm hydrated enough to continue, ma'am. Unless you wanted to finish your water first?"

The teasing question made Pearl look twice at the bottle in her hand, as though she hadn't realized what she was holding in the first place. "Oh! No," she said, and flashed the bottle into her gemstone. "Now, since you'll be taking a more active part in how we train, we may as well start now. What would you like to work on?"

Connie's hand tightened on the grip of her training saber. With her head clear, her whistle wetted, and her guilt safely tucked into her half-hollow, it was easier for her to remember that she was only half the reason for the loss of Rose's sword. The other half had batted her around with ease, laughing at her powerlessness and at the corruption that had twisted her body beyond recognition.

"May we do more emulation training, ma'am?" The rough approximation of other Gems that Pearl could create through her doppelgangers weren't completely true to the originals, but they were close enough for Connie's mood.

"Ooh!" Pearl hummed in approval, and poised herself to create a fresh hologram. "Who should our victim be? A Ruby? A Citrine? Another Flint, perhaps?"

"A Pyrite," Connie said. Her heart sank a little as she watched Pearl drop the poise for uncertainty. "Is that okay? Or can you not do a Pyrite?"

"No," Pearl said, and then quickly after, "Well, yes. I didn't see much of the Pyrite that attacked us. But based on what I did see, and what you, Steven, and Garnet told us, she isn't anything like the Pyrites I've seen."

"What do you mean?" asked Connie.

Pearl opted to show her. With a flourish, the graceful Gem produced a blue double of herself, and then commanded it, "Holo-Pearl, emulation: Pyrite."

The transformation was over before Connie could blink. Unlike with other emulations, this Holo-Pearl's frame didn't really expand to suggest a greater strength, keeping instead its lithe build. Delicate fingers gripped the haft of a spear that had been warped to include a single, curved axe head. Pointed hair extended down to the shoulders in a simple bob. A haughty expression filled the hologram's features as it announced, "I glitter for the good of the Authority!"

With a shrug, Pearl gestured to the emulation and said, "They used to be much more common, I think, but they fell out of fashion long before the war. The last time I was on Homeworld, the few that were left were used as honor guard, standing next to doors and looking pretty." Her mouth twisted around that last description.

Appraising the Pyrite, née Pearl, Connie could see the twisted logic behind the soldier's graceful build. Hulking Quartzes like Jasper and Milky must have been meant to correct the arrogance of prizing form over function. Of course, that attitude had given them Rose Quartz, so maybe the lesson should have been don't be despotic jerks.

Her grip fixed around the hilt of her saber, and Connie bared her teeth in a wild grin. "Looks aren't everything," she declared, and nodded her readiness to Pearl.

The Gem grinned in kind and leapt clear of the Arena floor. Then the fight began.

A blur of motion rushed at Connie, coalescing into the arc of an axe swing meant to take her head. Just because a Pyrite wasn't impressive by Gem standards, it still outmatched any human in strength and speed. But Connie had known since the first time she had touched a sword that every fight ahead would be unfair. She had trained knowing it, and wasn't afraid of it. As soon as she saw movement she was backing away, circling and keeping her blade raised to the emulation, giving her the distance and time she needed to find her opening.

Distance, it turned out, was no issue for the Holo-Pearl. Its axe had enough reach to keep after Connie. Though its swings were blunt, lacking any real elegance, it was enough to keep Connie on the defensive. Twice she had to slap away the axe's shaft or else end up with its blade in her teeth. That kind of reach wasn't easy to counter unless she could find a way inside the weapon's arc.

Connie's mind raced while her hands and feet moved on reflex to keep the fight at a stalemate. She knew there were several ways to skirt the axe and get at its wielder. But winning the fight wasn't the only challenge in front of her anymore. She needed to forge her own path as a warrior, and that started with choosing a weapon. She wanted it to be her weapon, the weapon she might pull from Jade's gemstone, but that meant finding it first. Only Jade could summon the tool meant for her. Since she was gone, that left it up to Connie to be Jade in her stead.

Loosing one hand from her saber, Connie tried to grab the air and push it into the hologram. Jade could summon a gale that would have blasted her foe to the horizon. When Connie tried it, she felt her fingers push through a thick soup of air, as though she were trying to shove a wall of cold tapioca. Barely a puff emerged from her palm to ruffle the hologram's bob of hair.

The effort exhausted Connie, and almost cost her the match. Only a frantic backpedaling saved her from the axe head as it buried into the flagstone in front of her. She raised her sword, found her balance again, and thought anew. Clearly her gusts weren't up to the task. She cursed herself for trying something new in the middle of a fight. Stupid. Reckless. Foolish.

With a growl, she took those thoughts and stuffed them into her half-hollow.

Then she blinked, almost forgetting to duck the next axe blow. Her half-hollow had been made when Jade left. It was everything absent about the Gem, and it was hungry for the negativity Connie had been feeding it. She had spent the last week trying to fill it with all of the garbage feelings that seemed to make her new wind powers work at all. One power in particular she knew already worked, and almost always when she wanted it to.

She didn't have to wait long for the right moment. The Holo-Pearl swung like a thresher, quickly and powerfully but in a predictable motion. Just as the next swing passed, Connie reached out, not with her hand, but with her half-hollow. It felt strange, as though she were trying to move a limb she had lost, and her concentration faltered. So she gritted her teeth and screamed silently into the half-hollow, Do it, human!

The air in front of her foe collapsed into a shimmering blur the size of Connie's fist, and the sudden inversion dragged the hologram face-first into the shimmer. Connie could feel the half-hollow strain against the tension, threatening to tear apart, and she realized she had overreached. She couldn't hold that much pressure all at once. So she didn't.

As her half-hollow released, Connie watched the shimmer explode into an invisible blast. The hologram was flung backwards across the Arena. Its axe spun and clattered to rest far, far out of reach, hardly stopping before it dissipated into its constituent motes.

Connie could only imagine what her face looked like as her lips peeled back at the hologram shambling to its feet. Her half-hollow stretched unseen across the Arena, straining farther than Connie thought possible, and gathered another air grenade beneath the dull emulation.

Worthless human! Connie snarled into herself.

This second burst was larger than the first, and it threw the hologram over the Arena's edge. The misshapen Holo-Pearl slammed into the floating pieces of a column and then tumbled, vanishing down toward the earth below.

Gasping, Connie collapsed to her knees. Her saber dropped next to her as she sucked in greedy lungfuls of air. Every muscle in her ached, but with the satisfied kind of pain that came from pushing through a workout. Her half-hollow felt empty again instead of teeming with all of the things she had been trying to hide in it.

A long shadow fell across her. She looked up and saw Pearl waiting with an uncertain expression. Offering Connie a hand, Pearl said, "Er, that was quite impressive. Well done. What exactly was that?"

Connie accepted the hand as she tried to reassure Pearl with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "I think that was the first piece of my style," she said.

That's how a Jade fights, she added silently. And her half-hollow ached in agreement.

Chapter Text

Her hands followed the path burned into her memory. Creases and folds became wings that spread out from a squat, angular body. A little tuck made the beak, and then her latest creation was ready to join the rest of the flock on the porch railing.

"Not a flock," Connie mumbled to herself as her booking inundated her under a mountain of facts. She nudged the paper crane into line with the others, lengthening the row she had spent the better part of the morning in making. "It's a dance, a sedge, or a siege, or a swoop. Or, I guess, a construction," she said, and chuckled as she poked the little origami piece.

Steven had left earlier in the morning to help his father at the car wash. More than likely that help would become the two of them noodling on guitars while they waited for a customer, and Connie was glad. Her own fleeting homesickness made her feel guilty about how much time Steven was spending with her already. He deserved time with his father.

But as soon as Steven had left, a quiet miasma had filled the house with his absence. Connie hadn't lasted fifteen minutes before she had fled to the porch to escape the feeling of being an intruder in someone else's home. After a full week at the house, she still felt like a visitor, and without Steven or any of the Gems around, she felt like an intruder.

No, not like an intruder. She felt like an extra piece found in the wrong puzzle box, something that only fit with the rest of the puzzle if it was pounded into place, and even then it didn't match the rest of the picture.

She tried shaking the feeling, tried stuffing it into her half-hollow until the emptiness was fit to burst. Still, it persisted. So she decided to try and take her mind off of things with the packet of origami paper her parents had packed for her with her summer gear. It had only taken seconds for her to learn a dozen new origami patterns, and the crane was supposed to be a token of luck, assuming she could fold enough of them. So the railing was packed wingtip to wingtip with the birds. Yet her half-hollow was still full, and her fingers were sore, and her luck felt just as crummy as it ever had.

Growling in frustration, Connie pushed her hand out at the row of birds. Her air grenades were easier to make now, but she knew they were child's play compared with all of the things Jade could do with her wind powers. Connie would have to find that same kind of strength and precision if she ever wanted to measure up to who Jade had been.

Stupid human! Connie snarled inside her head as she thrust her hand forward.

The paper crane meant for her gale blast continued to sit, heedless of her effort.

Over and over, Connie threw her hands forward as if to push the air, yelling invectives in the privacy of her own thoughts. Stupid! Useless! Worthless! But her paper flock remained where it was, and the morning air remained as still as ever. The only air she managed to move was the puffing of her heavy breath as she leaned on her knees, giving up.

"What does it take to make you guys fly?" Connie wheezed at her paper crane lineup.

"Have you tried bread?" one of the cranes answered her.

Connie shrieked, tumbling backwards from the railing, and the talking origami cackled and slapped its wing on the rail. This particular crane was purple, which wasn't so odd coming from a multi-colored packet of paper. But it also had a large purple gemstone tucked under its body, mostly out of sight unless someone knew to look for it.

"Amethyst?" Connie croaked, dragging herself up out of her own tangled limbs. "How long have you been there?"

"A while, I think? You were totally zoned out, and I wanted to watch without interrupting. I like your little dudes," the transformed Gem said. Her little paper beak wiggled as she spoke, and her eyes blinked from the front of the crane's body. The wings crinkled as she flapped and said, "Quack! Quack! Gimme bread!"

Stomach clenching, Connie felt an old shyness sprouting back up from where she'd tried to bury it. She had thought she was alone at the house, which felt weird enough, but not being alone and not realizing it felt so much weirder. "Um, it's just something I'm trying to help me relax," she stammered, gesturing to her efforts on the rail. "There are fables about warriors who meditated while folding a thousand paper cranes, and they were granted their heart's desire. …not that I think that'll actually happen. I just thought it sounded cool."

She cringed, wishing she could suck the words back into her mouth. Origami fables? Amethyst would think she was a child!

"Wish birds? Cool," Amethyst said. The Gem flashed, melting her body off the rail in a rush of white light that coalesced back into her usual stocky shape. She plucked her former neighbor up and inspected him closely, tilting the crane until it pecked her on the nose. "In that case, maybe don't wind-zonk them, or you'll have to start over again. That's what you were doing before, right? With all that flailing?"

Cringing harder, Connie tried to fling them out of this conversational cul-de-sac, blurting, "Did you need something?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah!" Amethyst tossed the bird as if she were releasing a magician's dove to a crowd, ignoring the way it nosed into the deck when she turned away. "Today's my day to chill with you! So, what did you want to do?"

Connie jolted. She had been so preoccupied with thinking about developing her own fighting style, and harnessing her wind powers, and learning how to utilize her half-hollow, that she had completely forgotten about her day with Amethyst. Had she been tasked with thinking of something to do with the other Gems? Pearl had always kept her own meticulous lesson plans, and it had never occurred to Connie to think the other Gems might be different.

"We could go surfing, or catch some sun. Maybe go explore some old Gem junk?" suggested Amethyst.

But of course the other Gems would be different! Garnet was a taciturn mystery, and Amethyst was like some immortal rowdy professional wrestler-slash-standup comedian. A careful decision had been waiting for Connie, and she'd been too preoccupied to realize it, and now she was wasting Amethyst's valuable time when the Gem had already agreed to spend time with Connie even though she had no good reason to even want such a thing!

"Ooh! You know what I've always wanted to try? Pole-vaulting!" Amethyst shapeshifted her thumb and pinkie, sending both far in opposite directions of her hand until they formed a long, flexible rod, which she hefted, letting the ends wobble. "It's like, you could just get a ladder, but instead you throw yourselves over some stick just to see if you can? How crazy is that!" she laughed.

Breaking free of her whirlpool of thoughts, Connie pointed to the Gem's hand and exclaimed, "That! Let's do that!"

Amethyst threw her arms in the air, lifting the finger-pole high. "Finally! Pearl would never let me do it with Steven, but I totally think we can make the roof if we—"

"No, no," Connie clarified, and pointed at Amethyst's transformed hand. "That. I want you to teach me how to shapeshift." Shapeshifting was one of the powers she had barely experienced even secondhand, and had no idea of how to start since she and Steven had added it to her list. If Pearl the sword master could teach Connie the blade, it made sense to think that Amethyst, a master of her own shape the way most humans had mastered breathing, could teach her something about shapeshifting.

With only a brief pause, Amethyst grinned and shook her hand back into its proper shape. "Sure, we can do that. It'll be fun! Now, watch close, because I'm going to give you everything you need to—"

"Wait!" Connie shrieked, and now Amethyst tumbled back in surprise. "Sorry, sorry! I just… One second!" Connie rushed into the beach house, dove into her footlocker, and came back as quickly as possible with a pad and pencil, which she held poised to take down every word of Amethyst's.

Amethyst eyed the notepad skeptically, but stood and dusted herself off without comment. "Okay. There are really only two steps you need to know to shapeshift. First step: take your shape." She held her hand out for Connie to examine.

Connie's pen clawed at the pad, taking down everything. She even added a tiny sketch of Amethyst's hand in case she needed to refer to it later, labeling it Figure 1-A in anticipation of any number of future drawings.

"Step two? Shift that steez!" Amethyst flicked her wrist. Her hand flashed into the shape of a delicate, perfect paper crane seated on the stump where the hand had been. Its beak wiggled, and Amethyst lifted it to boop Connie on the nose. "Bawk-bawk!" she squawked.

Her arms fell limp as Connie stared. "Is…Is that it?" she asked. "There isn't, like, a mindset, or a thought-sequence, or muscle contractions, or projecting technique you use to become something? You just do it?"

"That's it," Amethyst agreed, and flapped the wings of her finger-crane. "Think about what you want to be, picture it in your head, and let your body flow. Give it a shot!"

A weary, frustrated thought rose to Connie's lips, but she swallowed it hard into her half-hollow instead. The year before, at Steven's birthday celebration, he had shapeshifted himself to be taller, and broader, and more distinguished. That particular memory made her cheeks glow, and she tucked those feelings safely outside of the half-hollow to unpack later, focusing instead on the objective particulars. If Steven could make his limbs grow, then presumably, Connie could as well.

Squatting into a deep stance, Connie held her arms out before her, staring at the knuckles of her clenched fists. "Shape…shift!" she commanded, willing her fists to extend beyond her wrists.

The fists remained exactly where they were.

"Shift!" she demanded. "Shift!"

Amethyst rested a hand on her shoulder, pulling her up out of her stance. "Whoa, easy there, tiger. You can't force it. You gotta relax into it."

Connie made another attempt, seeking to noodle her arms into being longer through sheer floppiness, and trying as hard as she could to keep relaxed. She relaxed as hard as she possibly could, her molars grinding in her cheeks, chest clenched to keep her breathing smooth and deep, eyes watering as she squinted to see past all her troubles to a calmer, newer, shapeshifted self.

Sighing, Amethyst gently pinned Connie's arms to her sides. "You look like you're pooping and having a seizure at the same time. Remember what the meerkat and warthog said? Kahuna Potato! If you don't get it now, it'll come to you later."

Another swell of frustration rose in Connie. She stuffed most of it into her half-hollow, letting just a little emerge as a sigh. "I'm sorry," she said, stepping out of Amethyst's arms. "It's just, I'm used to learning things differently. At school, or in music, or with Pearl, there's always a technique to learn, or facts to memorize. There's something tangible I can work on. This is different, and I don't think I'm gonna be very good at it. But I have to be, because—"

Because I have Jade's gemstone, and I don't deserve it, and I shouldn't be here, and—

"—it's important for me to work hard and make the most of my time here, especially if you're all being so nice and taking the time to teach me this stuff." Connie bit her lip, her guts clenching as she realized how big of a word salad she had just dumped into the Gem's lap. "Ugh. And now I'm just making it awkward. I'm sorry," she apologized again.

The obvious worry began to fade from Amethyst's features, and they curled instead into something more cunning. The stocky Quartz tapped her finger to her chin as she considered Connie for an excruciatingly long and silent moment. Just when Connie thought she would explode into another apology, Amethyst said, "Congratulations. You just passed my secret test."

Connie blinked. "Um, what?"

"I had to be sure you were serious about this stuff. Shifting your shape isn't for beginners, rookie. Don't you remember what happened to Baby Steven back at the farm?" Amethyst set her brow at a stern angle. She plucked one of Connie's paper cranes off the rail and held it in her outstretched palm. "He wasn't ready for the real deal, the true techniques of shapeshifting. But I think you might be. As long as you understand how deep you're about to go."

This was more seriousness than Connie had ever seen coming from the Quartz. Connie kept expecting a punchline, or a gotcha laugh. But Amethyst had fixed her with a stony look that would not be broken.

"If you lose your shape, you lose yourself." Amethyst's fingers closed, and the crane crumpled into a ball that rolled to the deck as she tilted her fist. "You have to do exactly what I say. This will be the toughest lesson you've ever had, a million times tougher and more awesome than anything Pearl's taught you up until now. Are you ready to—"

"Yes!" Connie cried. Then she clapped her hands over her mouth. "Sorry. Please, go ahead."

"…begin?" Amethyst finished solemnly.

Connie nodded deeply. Her whole body tingled with anticipation, as though it were ready to rearrange itself if only she could phrase the whim correctly. "Yes," she said, this time in a hush.

"Then hold onto you butt, rookie. It's about to get moist," Amethyst growled.

"Right," Connie said, nodding again, and then paused. "Wait. What?"

Gentle waves rolled beneath her, soaking the hem of Connie's shorts where she stood just off the beach. The water pulled goosebumps up her legs and turned the light breeze frigid against her wet skin. She kept her feet planted against the pull of the tide and tried not to shiver as she awaited further instruction.

Standing waist-deep behind Connie, Amethyst turned her back to the ocean, staring back at the temple carved into the face of the cliff. The Gem's features were as inscrutable as those of her home. She held out her hands, letting each wave rise up to meet her fingertips.

"Lesson One: it's all about water," Amethyst said. After a long beat of silence, she continued, "Questions."

"So, so many!" Connie said excitedly. "To start, why did you insist I put on socks and shoes for this? I was wearing my sandals before." She lifted one foot out of the surf to watch a stream of water drizzle out from the tongue of her sneaker.

"No, you interrupted me," Amethyst scolded her. "What I meant was, questions: you won't need them, so don't ask them. In fact, never question anything I tell you to do. That's Lesson One. Now where was I? Oh, yeah, water. Water reflects the essence of shapeshifting. Look at the water. Feel the water. Taste the water."

"Taste the—?" Connie started to say, and then recoiled at Amethyst's warning glance. She stooped and brushed her fingertips through the surf, and then touched her lips and gagged. "Yup. That's seawater," she coughed.

"Exactly. Water can be whatever it wants to be," Amethyst said. "It can take any shape."

"Technically, it just takes the shape of its container," noted Connie.

"Exactly," Amethyst said again in that same maddeningly calm tone. "You are the container. Your essence is water. Your container is also, like, seventy per cent water thanks to your human bod, so that puts you even closer, if you think about it. That's Lesson One."

"But you said Lesson One was…" Connie bit back another question. If she interrogated every seemingly nonsensical thing Amethyst said, she would never find the true sense behind them. This was a different sort of training than she was used to, but it was still Gem training, and she had to try her best. "Okay. What do I… I mean, tell me what to do next," she said.

"Close your eyes," Amethyst told her, and shut her own eyes as example. "Feel the water. Wait for it to show you the way."

So Connie waited, and waited. The rhythm of the ocean lulled her into a trance that looked suspiciously similar to, but definitely was not, boredom. She tried to imagine the edges of herself as an outline she could push and stretch against the cold water at her legs. When that didn't work, she tried imagining that outline being washed away by the water to leave the whole of her unbound, as free as the water itself. But still, her shape remained its shape.

Then a larger wave surged up from behind her, swallowing Connie up to the navel in frigid water. She yelped and staggered forward as the wave pushed past them to spill white foam across the shore.

"Whoops. Big one snuck up on us," Amethyst said, spitting up a stream of water as her eyes opened and her hair sagged wetly behind her. "Um, I mean, what did the water tell you?"

Everything below Connie's armpits was soaked to the point of clinging. Her knees quaked as the dampness seeped into places wholly unprepared to be damp and cold in so sudden a fashion. "It's telling me to stand closer to shore," she said through chattering teeth.

A smile split Amethyst's placid face. "Well, at least you're on speaking terms now," she said.

After too long, Amethyst let them out of the surf, making her soggy trainee wait on the sand while she retrieved something from the temple for the next part of their training. Much to Connie's disappointment, Amethyst did not return with a towel.

"It seemed like you and the water weren't having a good talk yet," Amethyst said, dragging an old cardboard box behind her. "But that's okay. It just means we start with the basic-basics first. So let's start over at Lesson One."

By Connie's count, this was the third first lesson. "Can Lesson One be something about putting on dry underwear?" Connie pleaded, still shivering.

"Hey, no questions! Don't you remember Lesson One?" Amethyst said. Then she cleared her throat and nudged the box forward, and began to lecture. "Now, Lesson One: if you want your shape to change, you have to want to change your shape."

Connie blinked, but said nothing.

"Don't look at me in that tone of voice. I'm totally serious. We're talking want-want-want it! It's deeper than skin, deeper than guts, deeper than your stone, all the way down to your bottom." The Gem twisted around and waggled her butt by way of example.

Jade's stone, Connie corrected silently. She also swallowed her suspicions at this new direction in her super-secret training.

The box jangled as Amethyst dug into its folds with gusto. "So I came up with a little motivation for you to change." Her fists emerged from the box with two long, filthy black chains trailing down from them. With another tug she drew out the chains' ends, each of which featured a large black ball forged from pockmarked iron. She watched the horror dawning on Connie's face and said, "What? I cleaned the bones out of them."

The irresistible force of booking flashed Ficklepedia articles about medieval torture and imprisonment behind Connie's eyes. "Leg irons?" she said, staring at the ancient shackles.

Amethyst grinned. "Yeah! I picked 'em up a while back in France. Not sure what all the fuss was about, but heads were really rolling, let me tell you. Anywho…"

The Gem's elbows glowed, and her arms stretched to cross the distance to Connie in a flash. Before Connie knew what had happened, she heard two loud klak sounds and felt the weight of cold steel through her socks. She jumped in surprise, and the grip on her ankles dragged her backwards onto the sand. Just as she'd feared, she saw the leg irons clapped around her legs, their weighted black balls pillowed in the sand before her.

"Hey!" Connie yelped.

"C'est magnifique! Now the only way you're getting out of those doohickeys is if you shape your feet out of the cuffs." Amethyst declared.

Part of Connie felt relieved that Amethyst was pulling this exercise after the part where they had stood out in the tide instead of before or during. The rest of her was lost as her mind tried unsuccessfully to book any information about lockpicking. She would have to find a how-to guide for later.

"I guess spending a day in these things will be good motivation," Connie admitted, rising carefully and testing the new weight of each leg.

Amethyst scoffed. "A day? Who has that kind of time? You wanted results proto, so we're gonna get 'em!" With another flash, Amethyst's ribs erupted with two more sets of arms, the new limbs arranged in matching rows below the normal pair. A dangerous smile lit the new octopod's features as she advanced on Connie, wriggling all thirty of her fingers.

A storm of tickling descended upon Connie, turning her protests into shrieking laughter as she twisted away from Amethyst's touch, only to find it waiting for her no matter what direction she picked. With no protection but her wet, sandy clothes, and with less than half as many hands as she needed to defend herself, Connie kicked her way free and tried to run. The leg irons dragged behind her feet, making her tactical withdrawal more of a jerky, halting stagger instead.

Giggling, Amethyst gave chase, catching Connie with a pinch or a poke every time the girl tried to dodge. "Lesson One!" cackled Amethyst. "The Four S's: static students suffer silliness. Now shift out of those dumb things!"

The chains behind Connie tangled, throwing her to the sand again, and Amethyst pounced before she could heave herself back to her feet. Connie squirmed and howled, tears rimming her eyes while she laughed uncontrollably. Finally she kicked enough of a gap between Amethyst's legs to crawl backwards under the Gem and scramble into a new retreat.

Connie ran up and down the beach, splashing through the tide and around the old shards of temple that had fallen eons ago. She clattered up the porch and over the rail, knocking her birds askew and nearly hanging herself by her feet on the rail. No matter which way she went, though, Amethyst was always there to encourage her with unrelenting tickles. And no matter how hard Connie laughed, how hard her ribs hurt or how out of breath she grew, her ankles refused to change their shape to slip free of their cuffs.

After an eternity of torture, Connie finally broke, collapsing onto the beach and struggling to breathe, her arms wrapped around her chest just to hold it together. "I give," she wheezed. "Mercy! Uncle! No more!"

Amethyst considered her pupil with satisfaction as she leaned back, flashing away her extra limbs. "Well, your feet are still the same, but at least your face is in a better shape than it was. I was worried that sour puss of yours would be permanent. Can't human faces get stuck if they make a face too long?"

A few more gulps of air quenched the fire in Connie's lungs, and then she sat up, pushing her familiar scowl through drying tears. As she stood, she looked down at her soaked and rumpled clothes, which were caked in a castle's worth of sand. "You're taking this seriously, right? You're not just goofing on me?" Connie said.

Gasping, Amethyst clutched at her gemstone and looked appropriately scandalized. "How could you even ask me that? Do you even remember Lesson One? I bet you'd never question Pearl like that."

"Actually, Pearl encourages me to ask questions—"

The long raspberry Amethyst blew into her palm drowned out Connie's retort. "Okay, time to change it up again," Amethyst declared, wiping her palm on her shirt. "Let's go get a snack!"

The bell over The Big Donut's door jangled merrily for Amethyst, and then rattled like a slow cough as Connie oozed through it, her leg irons chattering on the linoleum floor. The overwhelming smell of sugar and trans fats glazed every breath rattling in Connie's chest. Connie knew she was no slouch, and her morning runs in the sand had been getting incrementally longer all week, and her training with Pearl had made her fairly sturdy. But after being terrorized by Amethyst for the better part of who-knew-how-long, the trek up the steep hill to Beach City had felt like a thousand mile trek. She was running on fumes, and the leg irons were only getting heavier.

Her heartbeat was so loud in her ears that she barely heard the cheery voice greeting them from the counter, and looked up to see Sadie watching her with growing concern. The stocky blonde cast a suspicious look between Amethyst and her shackled student. Meanwhile, as though unwillingly conjured by the sound of the bell, Lars emerged from the back room, his hair crooked and arms stretching in the wake of what had probably been a nap. He glared disinterestedly at the trail of black scuff marks behind Connie and grunted, "Ugh. It's bad enough the tourists are back without you weirdos wrecking the place too."

"Everything okay here?" Sadie said. The pitch of her question seemed to be directed at Connie, as though she were waiting for the trainee to blink in Morse code to ask for rescue from a kidnapper.

Amethyst glanced back as though just now remembering Connie. "Oh, her? She's fine. I'm teaching her about Gem stuff. It's a Miyagi thing."

"What's a Miyagi?" Lars asked, sneering in confusion.

"Wave to the nice donut people, Connie," said Amethyst.

Connie was tempted to wave at Amethyst with a single finger, but her parents had raised her better than that. "'llo," she wheezed.

"Well, um, welcome to the neighborhood, Connie. I'm Sadie, and that's Lars," the blonde said uneasily.

The polite thing to do would have been to explain to Sadie how she had already met them as one-half of someone else. But thoughts of Stevonnie still prickled in Connie's heart, and she didn't have the breath to spare for any explanations anyway.

"Yeah, yeah," snapped Lars. "You want the welcome wagon, go bother the mayor. Now either order something or go make a mess somewhere else." He stooped behind the counter and came back with a broom and a dustpan for the caked mess that was still flaking off of Connie.

Amethyst scratched her chin in examination of the delights lined up in their glass case. "Gimmie a dozen chocolate, a dozen old fashioned, and…" She glanced back at Connie and said, "Did you want anything?"

"Water?" croaked Connie.

Sadie assembled the donuts in a box and topped it with a bottle of H2WHOA! from the cooler. The register blerped as she punched in the cost of the snack run. Then Sadie waited expectantly.

Amethyst snapped her fingers, stepping aside to clear a path to the register. "Pay the donut girl, Daniel-san," said the Gem.

Connie groaned and fished in her pocket. She didn't have much, but her parents had left her some spending money, and it would still spend even if it was a little soggy. But when she stepped forward to slap a bill on the counter, Amethyst's foot came down on the chains of her leg irons, nearly sprawling her flat. "Hey!" she cried, jerking to a halt.

"Don't pay like a human, all boring and blah," Amethyst said. The Gem's arms shifted to five times their normal length and traversed the store like a pair of extremely confused crazy straws. "Gems pay from far away! If ever. Shift your steez!"

Gritting her teeth, Connie extended the bill as far as her arm would allow, and then tried to push it farther. Her elbow started screaming at her. Then her shoulder joined in chorus. She leaned as far as she could, but Amethyst's foot kept her in place. "Almost," grunted Connie.

Lars buried his face in his palms and groaned. Sadie, looking even more worried, started to make her way around the counter. "Are you okay? I can come and get that for you."

"No!" Lars and Amethyst snapped at the same time.

"Allllmmmmoossst…" Connie moaned.

Blocking Sadie, Lars spread his arms and snapped, "We just started the busy season. If we do some stupid courtesy payment pickup whatever for one person, soon enough they're all going to want it! Then delivery! And who knows what after that! I'm not doing that ever every weirdo who comes in here," he declared.

"This isn't just some weirdo," retorted Amethyst. "This is a very important weirdo! She's a Gem in training, and I won't let you mess up her very delicate and extremely well-planned training exercise with your donut clerking!"

Connie tried to shut out their voices and focus on the watery feeling in her limbs, hoping that it was shapeshiftiness and not simple exhaustion. "Allllllllmmmmmmmmooosssssssstt…"

"Wait, she's got one of those rocks too?" Lars cried, and his eyes fixed on Connie's neck. "Isn't Steven bad enough on his own?"

"Hey!" Sadie snapped. "Be nice to Steven!"

"I want those donuts, rookie!" Amethyst bellowed.

Rolling his eyes, Lars snapped, "There's already too many rainbow freaks as it is, and now Steven goes and plugs a new monster rock into—"

Connie felt her hair flip over her shoulders, and she jerked forward at the force of a tremendous wind as thick and heavy as a telephone pole that exploded from her outstretched hand. She landed hard, blinded and shocked by the sudden pain in her knees, and clawed the hair out of her eyes.

She was lucky compared to Lars. Through a cloud of floating napkin tatters, Connie saw the lanky teen hanging limply from the shelf inside the donut case he had been blasted into. By some small miracle, the case had already been open from Sadie's gathering of their order, meaning that Lars was covered in the remnants of a donut rain instead of glass shards from the case's open door. He looked too dazed to appreciate the near miss, however, though it was hard to gauge his expression with the twenty-dollar bill pasted to his face under a thick glue of frosting and glaze, which was blasted across his front thanks to the box of donuts from the counter that had also been caught in Connie's gale.

Connie and Sadie just blinked at the fallen Lars while the rain of napkins gently blanketed the store. Amethyst winced, sucking a breath through her teeth. "Can I switch the old fashioned to some bear claws instead?" she said, and grimaced at her former order adorning Lars' limp body.

Half a bottle of water had eased the desert of Connie's throat. She slouched on The Big Donut's patio seating, drumming her fingers against the remaining half of her water as she leaned far enough back so she could see the store upside-down behind her. Her feet kicked idly underneath the table, their chains clattering. She sighed.

As the breath left her, Connie thought she heard something following the gentle sound. It was a whisper, a murmur, tickling her brain from the very lowest edges of her hearing. For a moment, she stilled, and tried to grasp the sound, leaning even farther back to tilt her ear.

It was the gentle breeze stirring around her, shifting through her long curtain of hair, gliding around her skin and clothes. The sound was so soft that it almost felt as though she couldn't hear it with her ears at all, but instead with—

"Hey."

Amethyst emerged from the store, and the sound of her voice startled Connie from the trance, knocking her off the bench with a yelp. The chains dragged up the other side of the bench with their weights dangling pendulously.

The purple Gem sat next to Connie's chains, setting aside the cardboard pastry box she'd carried out with her, and looked down at her felled student. With a twisting expression, Amethyst made a hideous wet sound with the back of her throat, and then horked up an old skeleton key the same color and material as Connie's shackles. With a turn of the key, the old irons dropped free, clanking onto the pavement, and Connie's legs felt gloriously lighter.

"Good news: the donut boy lives," Amethyst said as she helped Connie back to her seat. "He's already awake and complaining again. Bad news: Greg owes a lot of money, and somebody who's not me needs to tell him how many squished donuts he just bought. But, more good news: they gave me some non-squished donuts to get rid of me!" She opened the box to reveal a fresh dozen glistening, glazed little treasures.

Connie said nothing.

Sighing, Amethyst grabbed a donut and bit it in half. Her cheek bulged as she sidled the bite to speak around it. "So, I forgot to tell you Lesson One about my shapeshifting training. There is no Lesson One, or any lessons. I can't teach you how to shapeshift. Nobody can. But the way you're glaring at nothing right now, I kind of assume you already knew that."

Staring at her feet, Connie watched the red rawness fade from her skin from where the irons had clasped her.

"Gems don't really learn Gem stuff. It's like, nobody taught you how to breathe or be hungry. They didn't, right? I've always just kind of assumed." The Gem shrugged. "So, sorry. And sorry for lying to you, because it turns out it kind of was a goof. But a good goof. I mean, a goof for good, not just a goof that goofed well. Though I guess it was that too."

Connie's fingers rolled in and out of a fist, remembering the wind that had blown her money into Lars with the force of a cannon blast.

"You are way, way, way more serious than Steven was when he was learning this stuff. Which is okay. That's your steez, and you rock it. But it always seemed like the best way Steven learned this stuff was figuring it out on his own on his powers' time, not his," Amethyst said earnestly, swallowing her donut. "And whenever it got too frustrating for him, and Pearl was too fussy, or Garnet was too wrapped up in herself, I helped him just chill out and get through it. That's what I can do for you. That's what I want to do with you. Because you're a fun dude to be around. Just cut yourself a little slack."

Connie stared down at her palm, her gaze tracing the lines in her skin. She thought back to that outburst in the store, and she almost heard that sub-audible whisper in the air again. Then she said, "No."

"Oh, come on!" Amethyst cried, spraying flecks from her second donut. "I spent, like, ten minutes coming up with that whole speech inside! I had to stand there while donut girl fished donut boy out of all of the donuts I didn't pay for, and it was super-awkward!"

Shaking her head, Connie insisted, "That was the best wind blast I've ever done on my own, and I almost meant to do it. I mean, I didn't want to hurt Lars, and I felt really bad afterward, but when he started talking about Jade's gemstone, I…"

Taking up a third donut, Amethyst heaved a crumby sigh and said, "It's not exactly chill, but I guess it did kind of work."

Nodding, Connie said, "It did! All this crazy stuff did something. So, do you think we can keep doing it?"

Amethyst grinned around a mouthful. "I'll make you a deal. On my days with you, we'll come up with one—ONE—intense, crazy, non-chill thing to try for tricking your powers into gear. But after that doesn't work, we'll find something chill and-slash-or fun to do. Deal?"

The grin she had been fighting back suddenly won across Connie's face. "Deal, she agreed.

The Gem sagged backwards in relief. "Good. I don't think I could have faked another test thing for you to do. You kept crushing it." Smiling sidelong, she added, "Pearl was right about you. You are a good student. And I'm a good teacher. Heh. Can you believe she thought I needed advice for how to handle today?"

Connie's grin turned sheepish at the praise, and she hid it behind a donut of her own. "Do you have another Lesson One for me, Miyagi-sempai?"

"Just one more." Amethyst tapped donuts with Connie, and they both echoed a clink noise to each other. "No matter how tough it gets, a bad day is always better with donuts."

Chapter Text

"There's really nothing to worry about. I promise."

Connie bit her lip to keep her frustrations buttoned inside of her. She appreciated Steven's reassurance, but hearing it over and over again only made her worry more. Obviously her face betrayed her, or he wouldn't be repeating himself every sixty seconds like clockwork. Hunching over the kitchen counter from atop her stool, she tried hiding her face in her bowl of It's Bran, watching the little cereal cubes drift in a circle as she stirred her spoon without eating.

"Garnet's just quiet. She doesn't mean anything by it," Steven said a minute later. "And, hey, of all the Gems, I'm pretty sure she's almost-killed me the least. So that makes it easier, right?"

Today would be her first day with Garnet. Her first time alone with Garnet.

She had enough presence of mind to ignore all of the worst impulses of anxiety. No matter what her worst imaginings told her, she knew the fusion wouldn't suddenly declare Connie unworthy of her time, or a pain in her stones, or anything so dramatic. But she knew so little about Garnet that she had no clue of what to expect, or what they might do together. How could she steel herself for the unexpected when she couldn't even imagine what to expect besides disaster?

A begrudging spoonful of cereal made it through her grimace. If nothing else, she knew she didn't want to be faint with hunger when Garnet came calling. "It's fine, Steven," she said, trying to sound convincing. "I just don't want to mess this up. You know?"

Steven smiled gamely around a dribble of milk. "You're just spending time together. You can't mess that up."

"Good advice."

Both teens jumped at the sudden words. Garnet had walked up soundlessly to stand behind them. Her bejeweled hand already hung poised to keep Connie from toppling off the stool. Connie would have been impressed at the Gem's natural stealth, but she could only wonder how much of her whinging Garnet had heard, and how mortified she should be.

"Hey, Garnet!" Steven chirped. "We were just talking about you. Were your ears burning?"

Garnet's head tilted. "Not yet, but maybe later. Right now, it's my day with Connie. I'd like to go now, if you're ready," she said, directing the last at the red-faced Connie.

"Ready!" Connie squeaked, jerking upright. She wouldn't have dared say otherwise even if she'd broken both her legs in her fall. Hopping from foot to foot, she tried to turn her anxiety into something that looked like eagerness. "I spent the morning prepping anything I might need: survival gear, navigational tools, rations. Just tell me what to bring."

Garnet shrugged.

As seconds ticked by, Connie realized that had been the entirety of the Gem's answer. "Um, weapons?" she suggested uneasily.

A glint crossed Garnet's visor. "Bring what you need to feel safe."

Connie started to ask for more, but then stopped. Garnet didn't seem inclined to offer more details, so badgering her for them might be the wrong thing to do. Perhaps this was Garnet's way of testing her, seeing what Connie thought she might need without being prompted. A secret test! Already, she could feel her breakfast churning, but she stuffed the feeling down and focused. Connie knew tests. She could do this.

Hurriedly she rushed to her footlocker. Her carefully organized equipment sat on top of it, but she only took a moment to consider before she rejected most of it. Instead, she picked up a sheath and saber, both gleaming as if new, and strapped the blade over her V-neck shirt. At Pearl's suggestion, and with the Gem's generous providing, she had taken a saber from the arsenal kept up at the Sky Arena for practice on her own time. The blade was no equal to the sword she had lost, but it was still expertly forged, and more than capable of dealing out harm where harm was needed.

When she ran back from the living room, Garnet was already waiting for her on the warp pad. As Connie hurried to join her, the Gem's hand stopped her, proffering a box of tissues. Connie balked at the odd offering, and said, "Um, no thanks. I don't think I'll need those."

Garnet tossed the tissue box aside, offering no explanation for the offer or comment on the refusal. More cautiously, Connie made to step onto the warp pad, but Garnet held up an empty hand this time to stop her.

"Before we start," the Gem said, fixing Connie with a serious look made mystery by her mirrored visor, "there's one last thing: you only get to ask one question today."

Connie stared, horrified. She wasn't alone, as Steven gasped at the proclamation. "Only one question?"

"Yes," said Garnet.

"How come?" he insisted.

"I can't answer that. You already used your question," Garnet told him.

Steven grimaced. "Aw, nuts," he cursed. Then he shrugged, and decided, "Eh, no regrets."

"Luckily, Connie still has her question," the Gem added, turning her visor back upon the quaking teen in question. Garnet's hand dropped, and she said, "Now, if you're ready, we can go."

Connie swallowed hard. She already had a hundred questions she wanted to ask Garnet about this new, seemingly arbitrary question cap, and that was on top of the thousands of ever-present questions she had about being a Gem, living with Gems, Gem history, Gem culture, their Homeworld, and everything in between. But she swallowed again, letting those questions fall back into the pool of It's Bran inside of her. "Ready," she said, feeling anything but.

"Bon voyage!" Steven called as the warp tunnel swept away the pair.

As the white light rushed around them, Connie felt her questions squirming back up her throat. Where are we going? What's going to happen? Why only one question? Are questions dangerous where we're going? Garnet's implacable bearing gave her nothing. She tried to think of which question to ask, the one that would give her what she needed, the one that would impress the mysterious fusion the most.

And when her feet landed on the new pad, all of those questions evaporated, leaving her speechless.

The curtain of light fell, revealing a lush valley of greenery rolling out from the pad in every direction. Thick, bright globs of color dappled the fields with glistening reds that peered out through leaves. A sweet fragrance hung in the air, too sugary to be floral, and it rode a breeze that felt cooler than the summer heat they had left behind. By the crispness and thinness of the air, and the impossibly clear blue of the sky overhead, Connie guessed they had landed somewhere at a high altitude.

As her gaze fell back from the horizon, Connie saw the source of the sweet fragrance, and gasped. Those red blotches among the greenery belonged to strawberries. These berries were a far cry from those in the plastic cartons her mother brought home from the grocery store. The smallest of the berries was bigger than a pumpkin, and the largest of them might have crushed Connie if she tried to pick them. Every strawberry around her looked and smelled perfectly ripe, impossibly so. And there were thousands of them. Tens of thousands, stretching for miles in every direction she could see. And they were the least of the wondrousness before her.

Sitting among the fields, less than a mile away, stood a pyramid balanced on its tip. Its brown stone looked unmarred in spite of its obvious age, for only Gems could build such an impossibility of architecture. She recognized the glyphs on its sides from the old leather journal of Buddy Buddwick's that she and Steven had poured over, and knew its importance from a story Steven had related to her. It was a temple of traps and mysteries, one the Gems had already conquered. Would Garnet take her there? Had the Gems forgotten something from their first visit to the pyramid?

And beyond the pyramid, halfway to the horizon, sat large pieces of a cliffside that had been shattered. Those pieces of the cliff hung aloft in the sky, risen up by some unseen power, their caps still tufted with grass from when they had been a part of the landscape. What had broken the cliff in such a gruesome way? Or was it instead the beginnings of some construction left unfinished when the war began?

One question. Connie couldn't make due with one million questions!

The enormity of the fields bore down on Connie until she felt dizzy. "Is this…?" she started to ask.

Garnet cocked her head back at Connie, waiting for her to finish.

The words caught in Connie's throat. She reeled them back, shaking her head, and instead offered in a quavering voice, "This is the battlefield. 'The' battlefield. This is where the war ended."

Garnet stepped off the pad. Reds and greens rippled across her visor before she turned it to the sky, making it flash with the sunlight. "The war ended everywhere. This is where I was standing when it did." The Gem began to walk, choosing one of the worn paths between the foliage.

As Connie's feet followed numbly, her imagination wandered ahead of them, rushing across the rise and fall of the landscape as she tried to picture what had come in the time long before. She knew that the Gems had cleaned up the land, maybe more than once, yet she could still see the rusty echoes of battle in blades and hilts that jutted out of the ground all around them. Far in the distance, she could see a divot missing from an entire ridge, and next to it, the brown rusted carcass of a sword as big as a city bus. What kind of mighty fusion had wielded such a blade that it could change the landscape for thousands of years to come? Who had made such a fusion, and what had they been like? Were they shattered or corrupted?

Maybe the floating cliffside had been blasted by some kind of Homeworld weapon, launched from a ship looming above the battlefield. Surely hundreds of ships must have filled the air, trading fire, or peppering the combatants below. Had one of their cannons shattered the landscape with such force that it still hung there today, forever shattered? What kind of weapon could do such a thing? Did they still exist?

Connie jolted back to reality and realized she was alone. Garnet had moved ahead, following a new, less-trod path between the strawberries. As she hurried to catch up, Connie's toes snagged on a strawberry runner, and she nearly planted her face into a giant berry as her knees struck the dirt. Her heart seized in her chest when her palm hit the ground less than an inch away from the tip of a filthy, ancient sword that was sprouting among the greens.

Garnet was next to her again before she realized it, offering her bejeweled hand. As Connie rose, she stared down at the relic that had almost split her palm. "Is that a—" Connie started to ask, and then pressed her lips flat.

The silent fusion watched her, waiting, reflecting Connie's own frustration back at her with quiet patience.

Clearing her throat, Connie carefully declared, "I guess it's hard to clean up all of the weapons when time keeps changing what's buried."

The corner of Garnet's mouth twitched, and her gaze rose back to the horizon. "Even with the pyramid deactivated, this place is still dangerous. That's why we tell humans to stay away."

It was hard to imagine human willingly giving up a perpetually ripe bounty of fruit. If anything, she would have imagined some huge factory on the next ridge, its smoke stacks belching smog as it rendered strawberries into jams, jellies, candies, perfumes, lip balms, and who knew what else. Just the idea conjured images of Amethyst chasing centuries' worth of venture capitalists out of the fields, and she giggled.

"This place must have looked really different back then if natural erosion is still uncovering these weapons," Connie said.

"It did," said Garnet.

When Garnet's pause kept going, Connie said too innocently, "I can't imagine what it must have looked like."

Garnet met the obvious bait with silence.

Huffing, Connie tried to think of another hook that might get the Gem talking. They were treading on history itself, cresting a ridge that might have been the site of Earth's liberation from intergalactic tyranny. The limit of a single question felt like it would choke the very sanity out of Connie. She wanted to scream. She needed to know all of it, everything! All around her were the echoes of excitement, and battle, and—

…and war.

"Then I heard it coming from the sky. It was…beautiful. Terrible. I did not hear it in my ears, but in my very stone. It was inside of me. And… And suddenly I was not a Jade anymore."

Jade's story, her final moments in the war, pierced Connie's imagination to turn her thrilling battlespace white with the force of a living sound. Three notes rang from Connie's memories, resonant, terrible. Three desperate Gems had huddled beneath a pink shield to become the only survivors of the battle. All of the ships, the grand and lumbering fusions, the countless warriors on both sides, vanished in one moment. One awful moment.

Connie missed another step as she looked across the fields. Every glimpse of the Gem war that had shaped their planet had tantalized her. She could learn everything about that history and still she would hunger for more, always more. But it wasn't history to Garnet. It was memory.

Garnet had invited Connie to walk through the worst moment of the fusion's life, and had offered Connie one question. Connie couldn't imagine she would be so generous with her own past. Did Garnet mean this gesture as a demonstration of trust? Was it a test after all? Was Garnet daring Connie to pry, or was she waiting to see if Connie lacked the courage to ask anything of substance?

She looked around them, and saw everything she needed to know. These fields were an important place, a dangerous place, a bad memory, a victory and a defeat, a remembrance of friends lost and times past. The details belonged to the people who had lived it. If they chose to share it, they would, on their own terms and in their own time.

If Connie ever truly needed to know more, she would become a true historian, and give those times and its peoples their due respect. She would not play tourist in something so hallowed.

"Garnet," said Connie, "I'm ready to ask my question."

The Gem stopped again, once more waiting patiently.

Connie's hand rested atop one of the enormous berries beside their path. Her fingers tested the nubby surface, the seeds in the skin rasping against her palm. "What made the strawberries here so big?"

A slow smile pushed across Garnet's face. "That's an interesting use of your only question," she teased.

Deciding to take a cue from her guide, Connie answered with a shrug. That only made Garnet's smile wider.

Her smile didn't last, though, as Garnet's visor turned back the way they had come. Connie followed her gaze to the top of a ridge near the warp pad where the strawberries were thickest and the greenery stood as high as Connie's waist.

"It was Rose," Garnet said.

Connie felt her chest tighten.

"After it ended, and Rose dropped her shield, we all saw what had happened. Our friends, our enemies, were all different. Twisted. We were all that was left." A tremor ran through Garnet's arm at the force of her clenched fist. "When she realized what had happened, Rose started to cry. And she didn't stop."

The lush green ridge told its own story to Connie now. As she stared, she thought she could see a swirl in the way the plants grew, as if there remained some focal point hidden under their leaves. Maybe it was foolish to think that plants could remember such a shape after countless generations. But Rose Quartz had possessed amazing powers to imbue plants with shape, power, and purpose. Maybe she could give them memory as well. Or maybe they wanted to remember.

"It was days. Or maybe weeks. It's hard to remember. Pearl and I weren't much better, but Rose… It's as if she took it personally. Like what the Diamonds did was somehow her fault." Garnet bowed her head. "She just kept crying. And as she did, she made something beautiful out of…this."

Connie felt the weight of that final word fall like a hammer on an anvil. The word felt like a burden of its own, one that Connie could feel a fraction of now. "Thank you for telling me that," Connie murmured.

Garnet nodded. "You're welcome."

As they resumed their path, a new silence settled around them, one more comfortable now that Connie had shed all of her worries about her time with the Gem. Connie couldn't tell if Garnet had a destination or a purpose in mind, but that didn't seem to matter anymore.

Unbidden, Connie felt a smirk twisting in her lips. "I know what you were doing. With the one question thing," she couldn't resist telling her guide. "You want me to figure things out for myself. I have to be able to find my own answers if I'm going to be a real Crystal Gem. You're teaching me, but you're being sneakier about it than Pearl is."

The Gem nodded, and admitted, "That's true." Then she looked back at Connie with her own smirk to match her student's. "But I also know how smart and curious you are. If I let you, we would be here forever answering your questions."

Connie couldn't help but laugh. "I guess I can be pretty bad sometimes."

"Mostly I just enjoy taking quiet walks with people I like," Garnet answered.

The comment filled Connie's chest with warmth, and she hoped it didn't spread into a blush on her face. She took a deep, peaceful breath and let it out in a long sigh.

Her lungs prickled at the breath, and she wrinkled her nose. "What smells like burning pie?" she said without thinking.

Garnet didn't comment on Connie's gross breach of the only rule she had set for the teen that day. Instead, she turned her face into the breeze, and Connie saw the fusion's brows dip behind her visor in a concerned frown. A glint flashed in Garnet's face. Then she bent low and wrapped an arm around Connie's waist. "Stay quiet and hold on," she commanded.

Connie held back another slew of questions and grasped the Gem's arm to steady herself as Garnet took off running. Garnet's legs were a blur beneath them as they traversed the fields, the greenery moving past them in one long blur interrupted by flashes of strawberry red. Squinting into the wind, Connie watched them moving from ridge to ridge faster than she had ever traveled across land without a car to do the work for her. Yet she felt as safe in Garnet's arm as she would have inside of any seatbelt. She just wished her stomach could keep up with their breakneck pace.

Though Garnet did the running for both of them, Connie still felt her heart pounding against her ribs. This kind of speed could only mean that they were running toward something important. It could be a new danger Garnet had spotted, or some corruption rampaging through the fruit.

But instead, as they stopped upon a ridge that appeared identical to any of the other ridges around them and peered into the valley beyond, they found a spaceship.

Chapter Text

Connie had only seen a few Gem vessels since her induction as one of Earth's defenders. The Homeworld Rubies' ship, now parked at the farm, was a red teardrop of a ship, something sleek meant as an interceptor or a scouting vessel. The ship that had brought Peridot and Jasper was sheer elegance, a battleship so powerful and mind-bogglingly huge that it could afford to put form ahead of function in its hand-like shape. This new batch of invaders had brought a personal-sized flying saucer, almost too stereotypically alien to be believed, but with speed and privacy that suggested it was a luxury more than a necessity. Though all different, each design held a core of beauty to it that belied the artistry behind everything Gemkind had ever done. Theirs was a culture inexorably linked to high aesthetics that outshone their commitment to functionalism.

This new spaceship was a box. It was rectangles on all six sides, each flat plane made from some matte, gray, boring alloy. Even its thruster assembly was just a pair of rectangles glowing in the aft of the ship. She couldn't see a cockpit, but she had to imagine it with a rectangular viewport peering out from a control station made of crisp right angles and crewed by some flat, boring Gem. Perhaps a Bauxite?

This mediocre UFO might have offended Connie if she wasn't already thrilled and terrified by the aliens milling around their ship's landing area. She recognized all three of them, and chilled at the sound of their conversation drifting up the rise of the hill.

"Flint," Milky Quartz whined, "don't hurt those poor animals." The massive Gem patrolled the edge of the shallow valley in which their spaceship had landed. Her bulk strained against her gray tunic as though she couldn't have imagined an outfit large enough to contain her pale white hugeness when she had formed her own body. Her one prominent, malformed arm, itself as long as Milky was tall and bigger around than any Crystal Gem, was lifted before her as Milky patrolled.

The gemstone in Milky's giant palm glinted, and Connie knew that it would douse her and Garnet's presence if it happened to aim in their direction. Finding Gems in hiding was Milky's purpose, her design, and poofing those hidden Gems seemed to be her pleasure.

"Oh, gerroff it, Milky." Flint, the Gem who answered Milky, was the bigger Quartz's polar opposite: spindly and lithe, colored dusky gray underneath a sleek suit of black and red, and topped with a puff of bright red hair that framed a seemingly perpetual sneer. Flames wreathed the slender Gem's hands as she stalked up to an unsuspecting strawberry bunch. "We're securing the perimeter like we were told. Not my fault if these squidgers don't have the sense to run." Her cupped flames became a jet of fire that billowed over the plant, turning root and stem and fruit all into a withered black husk.

Connie winced at the bright orange flames, and then winced harder at the dozens of little black craters that littered the valley where identical burnings had clearly happened. Flint's little deforestation game explained the smell that had drawn Connie and Garnet from across the battlefield. Really, they were lucky Flint hadn't burned everything to the ground, like Connie knew the skinny Quartz could do and would relish doing.

She almost said as much out loud without thinking. Luckily, Garnet stopped her by dragging the both of them behind a large bunch of strawberries at the edge of the ridge, giving them a vantage of the enemy Gems from hiding.

For a heartbeat, Connie feared they had been spotted when she saw Milky's shaggy white mane twitch in their direction. But the big Quartz kept up her regular patrol, circling the area as she had done before. "Aw, I think they're pretty," Milky told Flint. "And they're fun to squish!" She lifted her boot high and pulverized a strawberry as big as Connie's head to demonstrate, grinning at the red pulp dripping from her heel.

"I think it's cute how you both finally found something on this planet you can win a fight against." The chills returned as Connie listened to the third Gem's taunts. She remembered Pyrite well, from her powerful golden frame swathed in a garish leotard patterned with flames, to her glittering black cape slung from one shoulder over that arm, to the mirrored visor that framed her face beneath a sheet of deep purple hair. Even just leaning against the ship, Pyrite stood nearly as tall as Milky, almost as broad, but with a build that spoke of power instead of bulk. "But let me know if you want to tag me in to finish them off for you," Pyrite added mockingly.

The smugness in Pyrite's tone made Connie bristle. Her heart thumped furiously at the memory of Pyrite taunting her back at Ascension, of how powerless Connie had felt when she watched the bigger Gem tear through Ruby, and Steven, and Jade…

A sudden touch from Garnet startled Connie. The fusion rested a hand atop Connie's, which had unconsciously drifted to the hilt strapped at her shoulder. Bashfully, Connie let her hand drop from her sword.

"So funny. You must have a speck of Spinel wedged inside you," Flint jeered back at Pyrite. The flames snuffed from the lanky Quartz's fists as she kicked through the husk, scattering black clods across the grass.

"You fought a Spinel?" Milky asked in disbelief.

"No," grunted Pyrite. Her fingers absently fiddled with the hem of her cape. "Wait: one, yes."

Flint whistled. "Are you having a laugh? Which glittery upper crust was mean enough to drop their chuckle factory into the Brackets?"

"Who else? Yellow Diamond." Pyrite's cape glittered with a thousand different motes of iridescent color as she appreciated it. "It was a quick match. Though the Spinel had reach. And she was funny."

As Pyrite shifted to straighten her cape, a glimpse of pink color emerged over her shoulder. Connie's jaw tightened, holding in her scream of frustration as she saw the hilt hanging behind Pyrite's shoulder. It was Rose Quartz's sword strapped to the golden soldier's back by a pair of new belts formed into her leotard. Pyrite must have taken the sword as her trophy following the Battle of Ascension, which explained why the Crystal Gems hadn't found it in the aftermath. Connie had wondered if their enemies might have destroyed the sword out of spite, but seeing it on the Gem who had knocked her around with such ease was somehow worse.

Once more, Garnet had to reach a hand to stop Connie from drawing her borrowed saber.

Motion from the side of the spaceship distracted Connie from her anger. A portion of the ship's hull had folded outward, emerging from some invisible seam to lower into a ramp and hatch—both of which, of course, being shaped rectangularly. The dark interior of the ship came to light with a sudden glow, revealing stacks of bland, cube-shaped crates. One entire stack of the crates levitated down the ramp while a new voice emerged from within the ship.

"Flint, your recreational kindling is actually flora, not fauna. Not that I would credit a Quartz with knowing the difference." As the crates settled onto the ground, a new Gem emerged from behind them. Spindly legs carried her down the ramp in slow, measured strides as she surveyed her new surroundings. She was tall, thin, wrapped in a pristine white bodysuit and donned in a trim, long white coat that flared at the waist. Long yellowish fingers peered out of the coat's oversized sleeves, and lemony yellow features turned to take in the fields with a sour expression.

Pyrite's expression soured to match the new Gem's. "Welcome to Earth. And yes, it really is this ugly all over," she told the newcomer.

"Charming." The yellow Gem ran a hand over her hair, a black tuft atop her head so straight and flat that Connie would have sworn it was part of the Gem's head until she watched it bristle under those long fingers. "Now, be a good brute and unload the remainder of my equipment. I need to acquaint myself with the survey notes on this hideous planet."

Pyrite turned on the officious new Gem, her brow crushing against the rim of her visor in a scowl. "What did you say to me?" she growled.

With the golden warrior turned away from where they hid, Connie could fully see Rose's sword strapped to Pyrite's back. The sword seemed achingly close…

A tug from Garnet pulled Connie deeper behind their strawberry cover. Connie thought she might have been craning out too far, but when she followed Garnet's gaze, she understood, and she froze. Across from their shelter, Milky Quartz's patrol was starting back in their direction. In seconds, the Quartz's dowsing hand would sense Garnet's gemstones, Jade's gemstone, and discover their snooping.

"I said to unload my equipment," the new Gem repeated slowly. "You brute."

Pyrite loomed, all but blocking the new Gem from Connie's view. "You're smart, Polarite. You should already know who is in charge here. But if you forgot, I'd be happy to remind you."

"You would be very unhappy, I think," the new Gem—Polarite—retorted.

Pyrite loomed even larger. And Milky grew even closer to the edge of the basin where Connie and Garnet crouched.

"You and your cohorts were sent here under the administration of Zircon. That is because Quartzes and, ahem, other combat resources require constant direction lest they become aimless engines of destruction," said Polarite. Her pointed sidelong glance indicated Flint, who had started to flambé another strawberry patch further up the ridge. "I, conversely, do not report to Zircon. I report directly to Shard herself."

The creak of Pyrite's clenching knuckles traveled all the way up to where Connie hid, the sound as clear as day to her. And looking the other way, Connie saw the edge of Milky's gemstone as the Gem's giant palm turned closer toward their direction.

"I am the one with the technical knowledge to realize Shard's vision. I am the one who will bring the Opulence back to its fully glory. I am the only one who could have salvaged the access codes to the Celerity Forge," Polarite bloviated. In a keenly smug tone, she added, "And now I am the one educating our combat resources on the finer points of hierarchy."

There was murder in Pyrite's body, drawn taut to the point of trembling in her fists. "We have a different hierarchy in the Brackets," said Pyrite, making the words an unmistakable threat.

"Then by all means, return to the Brackets," Polarite answered calmly. "Or stay here and unload my equipment."

Milky was less than a dozen feet from Connie and Garnet. Fists on her knees, Connie held her breath as the stone in Milky's palm began to glow, sensing their presence. A questioning hum rumbled in the Gem's chest as she wandered closer still.

"Milky!" Pyrite bellowed. "Get the thinker's schist off the ship."

The lumbering white Quartz stopped, and her gaze ping-ponged between the strawberry hiding spot and the ship below. "Okay, but there's—"

"Now!" Pyrite snarled with her glare fixed on Polarite.

Connie's lungs blazed as she waited and watched the hulking Quartz. For a moment, Milky looked like she wanted to protest again. But then she shrugged and ambled down the ridge. The breath finally wheezed out of Connie in a wave of relief as Milky squeezed herself through the hatch on the side of the ship.

"Do cheer up, Pyrite," Polarite said. "Shard is pleased with your work here, in spite of the resistance you've encountered. She even sent something personally to help deter encounters with those wartime relics."

With Milky gone, Connie risked peeking around the strawberries again. Polarite stood at one of her crates and worked her long fingers under its lid. From out of the crate she produced a small, smooth, oblong carton. And when she opened the carton, she revealed two golden spheres sitting across three little cradles inside. Even from a distance, Connie could see a faint glow around the spheres, and she felt a tingle run through her body as she looked upon them.

Pyrite grunted. "Two? What happened to the other one?" she asked as she accepted the carton from Polarite.

Polarite's measured expression broke for a smile. "I used one as a precaution. No Sapphire am I, but I can make educated predictions."

Connie's stomach lurched as her mind whirled with too many possibilities of what the orbs might be. Clearly they were some kind of super-weapon that could destroy the Crystal Gems with ease. And Connie had the chance to end their threat then and there. If she could just get her sword from Pyrite's back…

Another tug from Garnet pulled Connie off the strawberry just in time to hide her from Flint. The lanky Quartz had run out of berries in the valley, and was burning her way toward their hiding spot. The acrid smell of strawberries boiling in their own skin rolled ahead of Flint like a silent herald, prickling its warning in Connie's nose.

The last stack of crates made it off the boring rectangular spaceship courtesy of Milky. Even for such a burly Gem, there were too many stacks to carry at once. "Do you really need all of this stuff?" Milky asked, scratching her craggy, stalactite-riddled chin.

Polarite sniffed. "It will barely suffice if I am to resuscitate the Opulence before Shard arrives," she said.

The words stopped Flint in her tracks and snuffed the flames in her hands. "Here? So soon? I-Is she on her way now?" Flint stammered, looking back at the pompous Gem.

Pyrite looked nonplussed. "We only have the one ship, you mudbrick," she deadpanned.

Grumbling, Flint turned back to the strawberry patch, still seemingly unaware of what lay behind it. "Chisel yourself a smile, you great glittering showoff," she muttered. Her fingers rose, igniting again, ready to incinerate the bunch.

Connie gripped her sword, her legs coiled beneath her. At her side, a muffled flash revealed Garnet's gauntlets held in ready fists.

As the pilot light on Flint's fingertip began to flare, a sharp tone made it fizzle. "Flint!" barked Pyrite. "Stop messing with those whatever-they-ares and grab a stack. We'll need to haul this equipment to the warp pad."

Flint whirled again. "By hand?" she whined. "None of the thinkers in this operation had enough cracking genius to think of bringing along a lev?"

"How about I twist you into the shape of a cart and jam a couple of wheels into you instead?" Pyrite suggested.

Milky had already lifted two full crate stacks off the ground, her mismatched arms wrapped around each bottom box. "I don't think that would work. And it sounds like it would really hurt," she said.

"Can't be sure until we try," Pyrite retorted.

"I guess not," admitted Milky. "Flint, do you want your face at the front of the cart or the back? I think I'd get dizzy going everywhere backwards."

A ribbon of smoke escaped Flint's gnashing teeth. "Fine! Yes! Great! I'm coming already! A couple of brilliant Quartzes designed to be the perfect warriors, put to their best use to do the job of some missing tractor beams!"

Connie peered carefully, watching Flint stomp down the hill. Black footprints smoldered in the Quartz's wake. Grateful that Pyrite's impatience had granted them a second reprieve, Connie let her hand fall from her hilt and allowed herself a tiny sigh of relief.

The burning smell wafting up from Flint tickled in Connie's nose. Before she even realized it, before she could stop herself, she sneezed.

Chapter Text

Thanks to an insomnia-fueled Fiki-fest, Connie knew—and would know forever—that the sneeze is a semi-autonomous, convulsive expulsion of air from the lungs through the nose and mouth, usually caused by foreign particulates irritating the nasal mucosa. Sneezes were powerful, with windspeeds of up to a hundred miles per hour. Of all the things humans expelled, sneezes were among the most impressive and least-ish disgusting.

Some studies had measured the average sound of the sneeze at eighty to ninety decibels. But those studies were conducted with adults. With her teen-sized lungs, a long and storied history of library quiescence, and having grown up around two silent-sneezer parents, Connie knew that her average sneeze was much quieter, probably under forty decibels. That soft a noise could be easily lost behind the ambient sounds of nature, especially when covered up by four angry and deadly Gems who wouldn't stop arguing with each other about which one of them would carry more boxes.

But Connie didn't have an average sneeze anymore. Instead, her sneeze erupted as a hurricane gale that knocked her out of her crouch. The wind blast carved a divot out of the ridgeline they stood upon and turned the strawberry patch that hid them into a geyser of juicy pulp.

Dirt and strawberry gore sprayed over the little valley, drumming the side of the parked spaceship. It spattered across the stacks of crates and over the startled faces of the four Gems, who had turned in unison at the sound of the explosion to stare at the two spies revealed.

"Gesundheit," Garnet deadpanned, rising up from behind cover that no longer existed.

Connie could only gape at the wreckage of their hiding spot, and then down below at the four expressions of shock staring up at them. A small, niggling, overly rational part of Connie's mind wondered how the equal and opposite force of her sneeze hadn't blown her head clean off her shoulders. Then it wondered if Isaac Newton had ever encountered the Gems while devising his Laws of Motion, and how much of his hair he must have pulled out at their stark refusal to obey those laws.

As the sound of the sneeze echoed across the fields, a sweet miasma settled into the valley, tamping down the lingering scent of smoke and char. Of the enemy Gems, Flint broke from her shock first to throw an accusatory finger up toward the ridgeline. "ESPIONAGE!" she shrieked.

Garnet braced herself low, gauntlets clenched at the ready. "Run," she said. And only when the fusion shot forward at blinding speed did Connie realize that the word had been meant for her.

Connie knew exactly what the intent of the word had been. But she refused to let her friend face this alien invasion alone. She wouldn't be an innocent bystander or a victim. And besides which, one of those enemies had her sword, Steven's sword, Rose Quartz's sword. So she drew her saber and obeyed Garnet's command in the worst way she could, charging down the hill as she bellowed her fiercest war cry.

In the time it took Connie to run five long strides, Garnet had already become a living nightmare to the enemy. Her gauntlet crashed through Flint's nose before the Quartz had finished her outburst. The blow flipped Flint hair over heels into Milky, and the two Quartzes fell into a tangle of limbs.

Garnet spun through the punch into a kick aimed squarely into Pyrite's chest. The golden brawler staggered, but then puffed out her chest, and the motion threw Garnet across the valley floor. Which seemed to be Garnet's idea all along, as the stoic fusion bounded off of Pyrite and made for the open ramp of the rectangular spaceship.

"The ship!" Pyrite bellowed, realizing too late to grab the fusion.

As fast as Garnet was, she wasn't faster than Polarite's gesture. The skinny Gem lifted her arm, and her fingers twitched. A chirpy bweep-bweep sound emerged from her arm and, in response, the ramp and door of the spaceship began to retract. Only a sliver of opening remained when Garnet slammed into the side of the ship. She jammed her armored fingertips inside to stop it from closing, and braced her whole body against the mechanism of the door, shaking with the effort. And the door, inch by agonizing inch, began to yield open once more.

Polarite lifted her sleeve to her mouth, and her arm bweeped again. "Beryl, launch!"

A tinny reply filtered out of the arm. "What? But I still have pre-flight diagnostics, and the gravity drive—"

"If the ship is compromised, then we lose everything, you clod!" snarled Polarite. "Launch!"

The sophisticated new Gem looked ready to hurl even meaner invectives through the connection, but Connie had arrived. Leaping, Connie swept her saber down into Polarite's arm and felt the blade ring against something metallic and draw a hiss of static that ended the call. She swung again, forcing Polarite backwards, and the Gem tripped over her own feet and collapsed onto her back.

"Hostile fauna! Hostile fauna!" Polarite yelped. As she crawled backwards, the fingers of the arm Connie hadn't chopped all merged together, combining into a long, curved pair of tines. Polarite lifted the tines at Connie, and the air began to hum.

Connie's sword stopped mid-swing. She nearly split her face open on the blade as her momentum had her crashing into her own hilt. Before she could recover, she felt the saber jerking straight upward, and held onto the grip for dear life. Her saber lurched overhead with her hands attached, her toes scrabbling for purchase on the grass as she dangled from the hilt. No matter how she pulled or thrashed, the saber refused to budge from the invisible force that held it aloft.

Polarite kept the sword motionless with her tines—a giant alien horseshoe magnet of tremendous power and specificity, Connie realized too late. "Fascinating," Polarite murmured, stooping to examine Connie's fruitless struggle to reclaim her sword. "The Crystal Gems have domesticated some kind of anthropoid servitor. And they've even decorated it with a faux gemstone. How curious."

Arching her body backwards as she clung to the hanging saber, Connie gathered momentum, and then swung forward with all of her might, kicking her heels through Polarite's jaw. The Gem collapsed with a squawk, curling into a ball on the ground as she cradled her face. Connie's sword fell free of the invisible grasp, and she stumbled back to the ground with her weapon in hand.

The spaceship door creaked, giving another inch to Garnet's unyielding might. The fusion's gauntlets pressed fingerholds into the alloy, actually distending the hull while the whole ship shuddered as if straining to get underway. Yet the ship could not budge because Garnet would not budge.

Then Milky Quartz forced Garnet to budge anyway, wrapping her tremendous hand around Garnet's waist. With a yell and a twist, Milky hurled Garnet out of the ship's door and cratered her into the side of the valley's slope. Pyrite was already in motion, flying through the air to stomp her boots through Garnet's visor, but the fusion recovered too quickly, rolling out from under the blow…but away from the contested ship.

No longer stymied, the spaceship's door closed, and its seams melted back into the hull. The only memory of the door was the shape of Garnet's grip bent into the hull, marring its otherwise smooth, bland perfection. Evidently the door's closing was the last thing holding the ship back, for the instant the seam vanished, the ship leapt skyward faster than Connie's eyes could follow. There was no sound of gathering power in its thrusters, just a whoosh of air rushing to fill the absence it left. It glimmered in the stratosphere for one instant, and then vanished in the next.

Connie rushed after Garnet, crying out in warning as Pyrite and Milky gave chase to the fusion. But a puff of intense heat raised the hairs on Connie's arms, and she threw herself to the ground in mid-stride. A stream of fire as thick as a telephone pole roared over her from behind, blazing through the space her head had occupied. The world became acrid heat, and she clawed at the ground to rise into a sprint, barely keeping hold of her saber as she escaped the flames.

Whirling around, Connie saw Flint snuff out the thick blast and begin gathering a new one. "You look better than you did at Ascension. Got your form all sorted out again, eh?" taunted the lanky Quartz.

Reacting faster than thought, Connie lifted her hands, reaching out with her half-hollow. She squeezed, and the air around Flint obeyed, dragging wisps of the Gem's fire as it condensed into a shimmering ball in front of Flint's chest. Just as quickly, Connie let go, and the ball exploded outward. Flint staggered back from the air grenade's detonation, and her own fiery blast went wide, blazing a nonsense line into the greenery far left of Connie.

Flint's haughty sneer melted into a scowl. "Why, you gusty little squidger!" she snarled, and blasted again.

Connie mashed another air grenade in front of Flint, and then another, and another. Every time Flint gathered a new stream of fire to hurl at her, Connie nudged the Gem with another node of pressurized air. Black spiral lines littered the ground to either side of Connie. The air shimmered with heat and pressure battling it out in the atmosphere. But Connie remained untouched, while Flint grew more irate with every wide miss.

"Alright, then! Blow this!" howled Flint. And she spun, drawing and flinging a black javelin from the gemstone at her shoulder in one smooth motion.

Her eyes prickling with sweat, Connie yelped and stumbled backwards at the sudden blur of motion. Something firm caught her heel, and she toppled, yelping, her air grenade missing its mark. As the ground rushed up to pound the breath out of her, she felt pain lance through her ribs.

Gasping, Connie clutched at her side. Her hands found the shaft of the javelin sticking crookedly in the air above her. As she ran her hands down, she felt sticky wet warmth spill through her fingers. She swiped at her eyes, feeling that same warmth smear across her face. When she could see her hands again, they were covered in red, dripping with stringy gore. The sounds of battle dimmed behind the furious beating of her heart as she pressed at her open wound in a panic, her chest heaving, her tongue lolling across her bottom lip.

She tasted strawberries.

With a second to think, and a deep breath, Connie realized that she had fallen backwards into a strawberry patch. The javelin was pinned into the ground beneath her with the edge of her shirt caught under its tip, which had grazed her ribs with a shallow scratch that she doubted was even really bleeding. Only the strawberries that had caught her had suffered, and they had exacted their vengeance by soaking through her jeans and her new V-neck shirt.

Stomping in fury and drawing a fresh javelin, Flint howled, "What does it take to land a hit on—"

Garnet leapt through Flint, the fusion's gauntlet hammering the Quartz through a line of her own charred strawberries. The quaking ground warned Garnet in time, and she turned to block Milky's enormous punch with crossed fists. Even blocked, the blow pushed Garnet back a dozen feet, the fusion's heels drawing twin lines into the dirt as she barely kept her footing. Then she sprang forward to answer Milky's punch in kind.

Connie rose when the javelin pinning her to the ground evaporated into motes. Her first impulse was to run to Garnet's aid, but Garnet seemed like more than a match for the huge Quartz. And besides which, she doubted her saber would do much to Milky anyway. Polarite had taken cover behind her stacks of crates to watch the battle, her half-hidden expression a mix of wonderment and fear.

Realization jolted through her, and Connie whipped her head around in searching. It took her two more seconds to find Pyrite, who had circled wide up the hill and now descended upon Connie with an almost casual stride. When the big Gem saw Connie spotting her, she grinned and reached under her cape to draw her manifesting double-headed axe.

Connie's hands tightened against the leather binding of her saber's hilt until her knuckles cracked. She felt herself scream, felt the sound of it tearing through her chest. Then she charged.

"Aren't you that Green Beryl from the landing pad?" Pyrite quipped. "You look different."

Steel flashed in Connie's hands, but it arced through empty air as Pyrite leaned back out of its reach. The Gem's axe swung in reply, a languid response that Connie could barely follow and only just ducked behind the protection of her saber, her arms quaking as the axe glanced off the blade. The blow knocked Connie back three full steps, her feet fumbling to stay underneath her. But she bellowed again, and attacked again. And again, her sword missed.

"You barely got away last time. I never thought you'd be the one looking for a rematch from me," Pyrite jeered. Her lazy axe caught Connie's sleeve on a near miss and tore it away, staggering Connie. It was all the invitation Pyrite needed to advance, swinging one-handed as she forced Connie backwards across the valley floor.

Sweat and strawberry juice spilled into Connie's eyes. She let herself believe they were the reason her eyes stung as she pushed back against Pyrite's taunts. Her arms trembled with the effort of deflecting the Gem's golden axe, and her breathing came in ragged snarls. But at last she saw her opening. She ducked the double blades, coiled, and pushed her whole body behind the hilt in one thrust, bellowing with every ounce of breath she could muster.

The saber stopped cold in Pyrite's grasp. The Gem had caught the thrust between her thumb and forefinger, pinching the flat of the blade. Connie's bellow choked into a whimper as she ran into her own pommel. Her hands remained locked around the grip on reflex as she fought to breathe again. Her weak twisting couldn't wrench the saber free of Pyrite's grasp.

Pyrite beamed at her as she struggled. "This one's new. Is it a local sword?"

The Gem's fingers twisted.

A flat thunderclap rang in Connie's ears. She staggered backwards, freed so suddenly that she ended up on the ground. Blinking, she stared at the stub of rough, craggy steel jutting out of the hilt clutched in her hands.

The rest of the blade remained in Pyrite's grasp, twirling between her fingers like a majorette's baton. "Oh, too bad. This one's no good. Your old sword was much better. I've been meaning to thank you for giving it to me." As she flicked the blade away, Pyrite leaned forward, putting the rose petal hilt behind her shoulder on clear display for her foe.

As she stared up at the Gem mocking her, something inside of her broke. The wall of her half-hollow swelled with the mockery of the smug brawler, and then cracked, spilling a sensation of cold lightning into Connie's chest and down her limbs. The hilt rolled out of Connie's limp hands, forgotten.

Connie reached up, gripping the air above her and pushing it back with a sharp sweep of her arms, throwing herself off of the ground with a fierce wind that billowed through her hair. The cold mountain morning obeyed her silent command, filling her hands as she cupped them at her waist. "Give me that sword!" she shrieked, and then threw her hands out at Pyrite.

A howl of wind leapt from Connie's palms to barrel through Pyrite. The cold air pushed against Connie, doubling and redoubling with every second she held the gale, but she pushed right back, gritting her teeth and planting her feet against her own funneled hurricane.

Pyrite's purple hair snapped straight back under the force of the gale. The big Gem lost a step, and had to press a hand to the side of her mirrored visor to keep it on her face. But that was all.

Quickly, the gale petered out, the force of the winds sapping every ounce of strength from Connie's arms. Connie wheezed and toppled forward, landing on her hands, her hair falling into her face. Every feeling she had stuffed into her half-hollow was gone, making it a true hollow once again. Empty, spent, she looked up through her sticky curtain of hair at Pyrite.

The Gem sighed, pushing her visor back up her nose. "I wanted this to be fun," Pyrite groused. "You were a lot spunkier back on the landing pad. What a disappointment." And she took up her axe, marching forward with renewed purpose in her gait.

Connie's body was spent. Her half-hollow ached emptily. But her teeth flashed in a snarl, and her trembling hands flew, throwing gusts of air that billowed over Pyrite without effect. "Give! Me! That! Sword!" She screamed with every blast. "Give! Me! Tha—"

The world suddenly glowed green. Connie saw her outstretched hands awash in the strange light, and Pyrite stopped in her tracks, startled by the light's emergence. Looking down, Connie gasped at the brilliance emerging from the stone beneath her throat. Then she lost her breath at the sight of a shape emerging from the stone, a shape composed of the purest green light she had ever seen.

She waited. The glow did not emerge further. It waited for her, Connie could tell. It needed her. No, that wasn't quite right. It knew that she needed it. So Connie reached up and grasped the glowing shape. It sent an electric jolt through her hand as she pulled it free of the stone, the glow fading as she swept the shape into fullness.

It was a sheet of green, metallic fabric, dangling from one corner in Connie's fist. The fabric twisted to the ground, where the rest of it pooled at Connie's feet. She recognized the material in an instant, remembering how Jade had shaped it into a sailcloth when the Gem had owned her body. In Connie's hands, it stubbornly remained a sheet.

"That's it?" Pyrite guffawed. She doubled over, clutching her midsection as she laughed herself hoarse. Her axe clattered to the ground. "Stop! You're gonna make me crack myself! Oh, my stars!" she heaved between laughs.

"Pyrite!" Polarite whinged from behind her crates. "Stop entertaining yourself and dispatch these rebels!"

"Sorry, thinker," Pyrite wheezed back, "I don't answer to you. I answer to Zir—"

Two rocketing gauntlets slammed into the cluster of stacked crates, which vanished into a blast of smoking debris. The shockwave threw Polarite across the valley floor to roll through a patch of strawberry char until she finally came to rest among the torn, blackened runners.

"My equipment!" Polarite wailed, gaping at the smoldering crater where her crates had stood.

Connie followed the gauntlets' contrails back to where Garnet stood poised and empty-armed. Dark bruises mottled the fusion's body, and the corner of her afro had been ripped away, but she still stood tall. Flint and Milky couldn't say the same, pulling themselves up out of the dirt where Garnet had evidently left them facedown.

Garnet paused only long enough to cover her gemstones in a new set of gauntlets before she rushed forward, a living blur that snatched Polarite off the ground by the collar of her long white coat.

"Tell us why you're on Earth," Garnet demanded, turning her gaze enough to let Pyrite know the words were meant for the golden Gem as well.

All of the mirth had flattened out of Pyrite's expression, leaving only her purified contempt. "How about this instead, doublet?" she said.

Faster than Connie could react, Pyrite slipped her boot under the tangle sailcloth in Connie's grasp and kicked it into the girl's face. Green fabric blinded her, and she felt something grasp the cloth by the corners and scoop her off the ground in a makeshift bindle. Connie scratched at the smooth metallic fabric but found no purchase to escape.

Through her fabric prison, she heard one word from Pyrite that filled Connie with instant dread. "Catch," the golden Gem said.

Impossible force mashed Connie into the weave of her own sailcloth. She felt herself spun like a centrifuge, whirled inside of the bindle, the blood fighting against tremendous G-force to reach her eyes and brain as the green world around her began to grow dark. Then the spinning stopped, and the force redirected her along a straight line, and she felt herself rushing into the unknown, blinded by the sheet pinned to her face by the force of the wind rushing past her.

Shaking her head, Connie managed to loose the sheet from her face, letting it rip past her and vanish into the howling wind surrounding her. When she finally saw where she was, her heart shrank, and her stomach dropped out of her, trailing a mile behind her: she was sailing through the air with the rolling fields spread below her for miles in every direction. Strawberries dotted the greenery like freckles, and the pyramid temple looked like a tiny model dropped and lost in someone's backyard.

Pyrite had flung her out of the sailcloth like a sling, throwing her higher and farther than Connie could have believed, and now she was arcing over the fields toward the inevitable end of her flight. She felt her own scream tearing at her throat, but she couldn't hear it for the wind rushing past her ears.

Too high, too high, too high! the primitive part of her brain screamed at her. Some more rational part kept her arms and legs wheeling until her tumbling slowed and she could push her face into the wind. She was unthinkably high, hilariously high, bodily at an altitude meant for airplanes and helicopters, not teenager, and she could feel gravity's pull correcting the mistake.

She tried to steady herself inside and out, steering what little she could with her limbs while she tried to take a deep breath. The wind didn't listen to her movements, and it pushed so hard that she could barely get any air into her lungs.

Really, given the force necessary to throw her to such heights and speeds, it was already a miracle that she hadn't broken her neck, or even just liquified in the sheet when she's been thrown.

Not helping, brain!

Already the ground loomed closer. Something dark ran across the ground below her as if to keep up, and she realized she was watching her own shadow racing over the fields at unthinkable speed. She had seconds at best before she and the shadow collided.

"Sail!" she screamed into her half-hollow. The thought echoed back at her. All of her misery had been spent in her useless blasts against Pyrite. No winds would listen to her, and Jade's gemstone remained dark.

Strawberries rushed below her in red streaks. The smell of lush green returned as the thin air became warmer and fuller. Her shadow rippled closer, closer.

"Jade!" The desperate sob came unbidden. She couldn't hear it, but she felt the name quake through her body with the power of her final word.

The earth rushed up to meet her. Connie screamed and closed her eyes.

Her dark world tumbled, her body jerking hard at her landing. She felt impact, and rolling, and heard leaves and vines tearing around her. The chaos rattled around her for three long, awful, endless seconds. Then it all stopped.

Connie was not splattered. Bruised, possibly cut and bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts, but definitely not splattered.

"You can open your eyes now."

The gentle coaxing made Connie crack an eyelid. She saw herself at the endpoint of a long, deep furrow in the ground, with shredded plants and strawberry pulp sprayed to either side. Garnet held her close, her arms and gauntlets still wrapped around Connie. The Gem had dirt and greenery staining her form, and half a strawberry had been lodged in her afro, filling in the corner that the Quartzes had ripped out.

Connie was amazed. The Gem had somehow managed to keep up and even catch her out of the air to cushion her landing. "Th-Thank you," Connie stammered as she rose out of Garnet's embrace on shaky legs.

Garnet's visor turned back to the direction they had come from, and she stood. As disheveled as she looked, she still seemed ready for more. "They'll be gone by the time we get back," she said, "but we should still check their landing site for any clues."

Connie opened her mouth to reply. Her trailing stomach finally caught up with her from the air, slamming into Connie and shooting up her throat. She fell to her knees and emptied her breakfast all over the ground. To no surprise, It's Bran looked more or less the same post-stomach as it did in the bowl.

"We can take a minute first," Garnet said, and rubbed Connie's back while she heaved.

Chapter Text

Connie trudged on long shadows back toward the warp pad. The sun sat low behind them, turning the strawberry fields into a dark nest of stalks, berries, runners, and buried weapons for her leaden feet to catch on, which made the going even slower. But the Gems behind her didn't seem to mind the pace, barring one loud exception.

"Hey, watch those hands!" Amethyst yelped. Her masterful shapeshifting had created a flatbed wagon big enough to haul back the collected debris that remained of Polarite's equipment. At the rear of the belligerent purple wagon, Garnet and Pearl braced on the back slats to push Amethyst through the rough terrain.

The lithe pale Gem grunted as Amethyst's wheels pushed through another strawberry, slowing their progress with its delectable, agonized gushing. "We wouldn't have to push so hard if you made yourself wheels designed for off-road activity," Pearl huffed.

Amethyst's face, molded into the front of the wagon, twisted itself to look past her spoked wheels so she could glare at Pearl. "How about you be the wagon and I push instead?" she snapped.

The arguments had been coming more and more frequently as the day had waned, and the last of Connie's nerves strained to hold her frustrations silent. Shortly after Garnet has saved Connie from becoming strawberry fertilizer, the two had returned to the landing site to prove Garnet's predictions correct: none of Shard's forces had lingered, but they had left behind the remains of their destroyed cargo. And so, with a brief stop back at the house to rally some help, they proceeded to excavate any trace of Polarite's technology from the site, gathering anything that might give them a clue as to the Gems' whereabouts or machinations. Only scrap remained, but they hoped Peridot might still glean some insight from it.

Steven kept ahead of the wagon to clear as many strawberries as possible from the wagon's path. Connie was meant to be doing the same, but couldn't muster nearly as much energy as Steven had. Her body ached, and her hands were raw from the work, and every inch of her was either dirty, or sticky, or both.

"Almost there!" Steven called as he rolled another melon-sized berry out of the way. "And that's one more for the birds. Or bugs, maybe. Do birds eat strawberries? They eat bugs, so I guess it still works in the end."

With four people pushing, and a little wiggling from Amethyst, they heaved their living cart onto the warp pad. Connie felt tempted to crawl into the wagon just for a chance to sit, though remembering that the wagon was also her friend made her feel weird about the impulse. Fortunately, the semi-weightlessness of warp space pulled them into the sky, easing her full-body ache.

Gravity returned all too soon, bouncing Connie onto the arrival pad with a jolt. She blinked at the interior of the beach house, surprised that they hadn't traveled straight to the farm. "Did we forget something? I thought we were taking this stuff straight to Peridot," Connie said.

Pearl rested a hand on Connie's and Steven's backs to usher them off the pad. "We three are," she said primly. "You two need to eat something and rest. You've been working all day."

Any argument Connie wanted to make was drowned out by the rumble in her stomach. She'd snuck a Protes bar when they'd first returned to the house, but had eaten nothing since. Looking back, she felt silly for not grabbing a handful of strawberry at any point in their excavation or the trip back. How much messier could it have made her to eat one tip-to-stem with her hands?

When Pearl's touch brushed the sheath at her back, however, Connie paused at the edge of the pad. She slung the sheath carefully overhead, keeping the hilt at the top. Once it was removed, though, she pulled the hilt out to show Pearl the broken sword. The rest of it rattled loosely in the sheath. "I'm sorry, ma'am," she said, offering the broken weapon to Pearl. "I should have taken better care of it."

"Goodness!" Pearl exclaimed. "Well, I'm just glad you didn't get hurt when it broke. We'll see about finding you a replacement when we get the chance." She smiled, but made no move to take the weapon from Connie.

"Should we come find you after we eat?" Steven asked.

Garnet shook her head. "After we're done at the farm, we'll be looking for signs of where the other Gems might have gone. They could have left traces for us to follow. You two should stay here."

Connie still lingered at the warp pad's edge, biting her lip. After a moment's hesitation, she stammered, "Garnet? I…I'm sorry I gave us away. We could have gotten killed because of me, and…"

"It's okay. You couldn't help it," Garnet told her. She glanced at Steven, and said, "Take care of each other."

The wagon's wheel stretched forward to nudge Connie off the pad. "Go on, already! I'm not exactly lugging feathers here," Amethyst complained. As Connie trudged back a step, the shifted Gem added, "Ooh, but don't finish all that leftover macaroni and motor oil I left in the fridge. I'm gonna be wheelie, wheelie hungry when I get back." Her spokes jiggled to punctuate the joke.

Pearl's eye-rolling groan followed the three Gems as they vanished back into warp space.

As the light faded and the chime of the pad rang silent, Connie sagged. A long sigh wilted her. She let her head fall to her chest, and the rounded edge of Jade's gemstone pressed coolly into her chin. The temple door across from the warp pad seemed to loom large before her, its five colorful gemstones dark and empty after the flash of the pad was gone.

Movement appeared at the edge of her vision, and she looked up to find Steven offering her a glass of water. He held a glass for himself as well, already half-empty. "It's not easy," he said apologetically, his smile a little sad, "being the one left behind. I get it."

The full glass of water vanished into Connie with one long gulp. "Thanks," she wheezed, fractionally quenched. "So, what now?"

"Now we eat and rest," Steven said. And he turned back to the kitchen to begin foraging in the refrigerator.

Her shoulders sagged a little more. "That's all? We're really not going to help?" she insisted.

His voice came back muffled from the interior of the fridge. "We did help. Now we have to take care of ourselves. Are you thinking sandwiches, or do you want to microwave something? I wouldn't recommend Amethyst's mac and oil. Her pasta always turns out crunchy."

Connie went to the sink and sucked down two more glasses of water. Halfway through another, she noticed the brown fingerprints mottling the sides of the glass. It took another two minutes of washing her hands before she saw the fresh, raw skin of her fingers again. The stark line of where her washing ended at the wrists made her cringe. "I, uh, think I'll take a shower first, if that's okay," she said.

"Sure," Steven called distractedly. He was playing smell-roulette with a host of different resealable containers he'd found at the back of the fridge, trying to decide what among them might still be edible.

Carefully so as to shed as little dirt as possible, Connie tiptoed to the living room and hauled out her footlocker. As she considered her wardrobe, her eyes drifted to the seascape out the window. Sunset had fallen across the strawberry battlefield half a world away, but there in Beach City, the sun still shone through a brilliant blue afternoon sky. She decided on a tank top and shorts since they wouldn't be leaving the beach for the rest of the day.

She was stacking the clothes together for her trip to the bathroom when Steven appeared at her side again, this time with a sandwich in hand. "Hey, what's that?" he asked through a spray of crumbs.

Connie yelped and stuffed the fresh underwear she'd collected from the locker in between her clean shirt and shorts to hide them. Then her horror tripled as Steven found, instead of underthings, a stack of facedown books in her locker. "Wait!" she cried.

But he had already picked up the top book from the stack, turning it over to read the cover. Connie only barely closed her eyes in time to keep herself from seeing it. "Destiny's End? Hey, I haven't seen this in a long time. And you brought the whole series? Awesome!" she heard him say.

"Put it back!" Connie snapped. She cringed at the edge in her tone, and even with her eyes closed, she could feel Steven doing the same. Trying to measure her voice more evenly, she said, "Put it back the way it was, cover-down. Please."

Only once she'd heard the knock and scrape of the faux-leather covers sliding together did she open her eyes, and found exactly the worried expression on Steven's face that she'd been dreading. Worse, he'd taken a full step back from the table. From her.

"Why did you bring your Spirit Morph Saga books if you don't want to see them?" he asked. Then he blinked, and she could see him realizing the true question in front of him. "Wait, why did you bring any books? I thought you had already booked though everything in your house."

"Almost everything," she admitted. When she had told her parents that she had read all of their home's books, it hadn't been a lie. But once she had started booking everything she could, she instantly decided to leave aside her collector's edition of her favorite of all favorite books.

"But why?" insisted Steven, looking confused. "You could remember all of it forever. Lisa, Archimicarus…maybe some of the cake stuff isn't your favorite, but—"

"Because!" Connie snapped. Once more, they both recoiled at her voice's edge, and she covered her mouth until she could blunt her words a little. "Because I want to read them again, and I can't do that if I book them," she explained.

He hung his head sheepishly. "I'm sorry. I guess I don't understand," he admitted.

She struggled for some way to explain it to him. Finally, she asked, "What's two plus two?"

He answered immediately. "Four."

"How do you know?" she challenged him. "Did you do the math in your head? Did you count it out?"

A scoffing chuckle rolled through him. "Of course not. I just know what two plus two is. Is this some kind of school thing?"

"You just knew it," Connie emphasized. "The answer just came to you when you thought about it. That's what booking is like for me. When I read something I've already booked, my brain tries to feed me the entire thing with every time I look at the next word on the page. Over and over, until I'm so sick of it I can't even look at it anymore."

"…oh," Steven breathed.

She wrapped her arms around her stomach and risked a glance at the blank back cover of Destiny's End. "I reread The Spirit Morph Saga every summer break. I used to never let myself read them any other time of the year, just so I could stay up late and go through as much of them at once as I could. The new ones used to come out at the end of the summer, so I'd always want to catch up, and even after the last one, I…" She sighed. "I was hoping I could get my booking power under control so I could actually read them again. Really read them, like I used to."

The but in her voice was evident to both of them. She had already speed-binged a full season of Camp Pining Hearts in just a few five-minute increments with no sign that her booking power could be stopped.

Connie sighed again and picked up her stack of clothes, making for the bathroom. "I'm going to go clean up," she muttered, hurrying through the door to avoid any further conversation.

She closed the door with her whole body, sagging onto it with her head thunking against the wood. A frustrated scream wheezed out of her in a long, long, silent sigh. Her whole body trembled with exhaustion, echoes of the adrenaline that had supercharged her body during the fight. She was embarrassed by her outburst at Steven, ashamed of how she had endangered herself and Garnet, furious at herself for not doing better or being better. It was too much for her to feel at once.

As the breath dwindled out of her, she let her glut of feelings drain into her empty half-hollow. She focused all of it into the void until her heart slowed and her spirit felt blissfully, emptily numb.

The pipes rattled, the showerhead hissed, and steam began to fill the room as Connie let the water run while she peeled herself out of her clothes. Muddy strawberry juice had staked its claim on her, taking its tithing of skin and hair with it as she worked the crusty fabric. Her clothes fell to rest in a pile on the floor, unsalvageable.

Dazedly, she stared at the mirror. The shower had conjured a thick layer of fog over her reflection, but she could still see herself underneath it, still intact, framed with a black halo of hair. And there at her center sat that tiny green speck.

"You were a lot spunkier back on the landing pad. What a disappointment."

Her whole body clenched at the memory of Pyrite's taunt. Eyes, fists, teeth, she tightened until her whole body shook. The black halo surrounding her reflection began to ripple, and she felt the steam in the room whirling around her body. Before she could erupt, she tore sightlessly into the shower and yanked the curtain shut, letting the water pound against her.

Connie scrubbed her skin almost to the bone. The strawberry muck sluiced off of her into a muddy pink swirl at the drain. She dragged shampoo through her long sheaf of hair until her scalp ached. The pain of her rough care trickled into her half-hollow, making it burn bright.

She gathered all of her sad feelings and stuffed them into the bottom of the half-hollow, crushing them to make room for something new. She was sick of feeling sad. Those feelings had wasted their chance to make Jade's gemstone work. Now she would give anger a try instead.

She would train harder. She would master Jade's powers, live up to the responsibility that Jade had entrusted to her. She would protect the Earth and become worthy of Jade's gemstone.

And she would wipe that smug grin off of Pyrite's face while she did all of it.

When she emerged from the shower, the whole bathroom was thick with steam, and the mirror was a solid gray wall. Only a hint of green color pierced the haze. But as Connie watched, it shone brighter. She looked down and found the stone aglow with a corner of Jade's sailcloth emerging from its surface.

It resisted her this time. She had to pull harder than she did before in the heat of battle. But finally the whole sailcloth emerged, fluttering in her hand as she held it up before her. "You're not what I need, but you're a start," she harrumphed to the cloth, savoring the little snarl she could feel gathering in her half-hollow and she fed it her angry dissatisfaction. Then, out of curiosity, she patted at her armpit with the cloth. "Huh. You're not very absorbent, either," she noted, and let the cloth evaporate into motes.

In short order, Connie marched out of the bathroom with fire in her belly, wet hair flopping at her back, and a thick cord of anger winding in and out of her half-hollow. Exhaustion would have to wait: she would tape up her broken saber, or find some old broom handle or other stand-in, and she would train until she dropped. Then she would pick herself up and train more. And if her body hurt, she would wring that pain for every last drop and feed it to her half-hollow.

But her determined march stopped short at the sound of a ukulele on the porch. Some nameless tune wandered the instrument's strings, the kind of song that went nowhere in particular and savored the journey in getting there. She started for the door, curious of the music, but stopped again when she saw a plate on the coffee table.

The smell of tuna salad pulled her closer, and she saw two sandwiches waiting on the plate. Her half-hollow growled, reminding her of all that righteous motivation she had been feeding it so it could feed her in kind. But her stomach growled louder, reminding her of the breakfast she'd lost and the Protes bar it had already burned through hours ago.

Her indecision must have been heard outside, because the ukulele music paused briefly. "Come outside when you're done eating. You can make yourself something else if you don't want tuna, or if you want more," Steven called unseen, his voice cheerily drifting through the screen door. Then the music started again, content to pick up where it left off on its trip to nowhere.

Connie considered herself extremely restrained in that she had only finished one of the sandwiches by the time he had finished speaking. The second sandwich didn't last much longer than the first, giving her only seconds to be curious about his invitation before she heeded his instructions and pushed through the door to the patio.

In lieu of the patio furniture, Steven had chosen to sit on the decking with his back to the house, his legs crossed and his ukulele in his lap. He rested atop a square white cushion, with an identical cushion positioned in front of him, both of the squares having been taken from the couch for his purposes. When the screen door creaked, he opened his eyes and smiled at Connie. "You look a million times better," he said, and quickly added, "Um, not that you looked bad before. You just look like you're feeling better."

Connie could feel the warmth spreading in her cheeks. She tried holding onto that anger, keeping the flow moving in and out of her half-hollow. "What is all of this?" she asked. Then she saw the object sitting on the cushion beside him, and her stomach clenched. "Why do you have that?"

He patted the object beside him, a faux-leather-bound book sitting facedown on the deck. Even with its spine tucked against Steven's leg, Connie recognized the color and shape and knew it immediately: The Unfamiliar Familiar, the first book in The Spirit Morph Saga. "I hope you don't mind that I grabbed this."

She minded quite a lot, and kept her eyes pointed skyward rather than risk booking any part of the volume. "Steven, I told you what happens if I read that," she snapped. Why, after everything she had tried to explain to him, did he think she would want to read? And why now, when the world was in more danger than ever, when Pyrite and the rest of Shard's cronies were out there, plotting and scheming and skulking?

His tone remained pleasantly cool in spite of the heat in her words. "You're not going to read anything," he promised her. "And if you want to leave, you totally can. That's okay too. But I think I know how you can keep your summer tradition going."

"How? Are you going to turn off my brain? I'm not sure if Peridot still has that gadget anymore," she said, not proud of how snidely she sounded, but not altogether unhappy about it either. "Steven, I can't—"

"Do you remember what I said yesterday?" he interrupted her gently. His hand was still poised on the book, but he made no move to lift it. "When I got back from my dad's, before dinner. Do you remember exactly what I said, word for word?"

Frustrated, she gave her memory a halfhearted skim. "I don't know. Something about how your dad tricked you into licking one of the car wash brushes?" she said. It had been funny at the time, but she had no patience for reminiscing, especially about something that had just happened a day ago.

He grinned. "Exactly. When someone just talks to you, you don't automatically book it, right? You have to be reading, or watching. Focused. But if you're relaxed, just talking or listening to someone, you don't book what you say or hear." He patted the book again, and declared, "Well, if you can't read your book yourself, then all you need is someone to read it for you."

She let her gaze drop back to him, surprised. Then she hardened her face, and said, "Steven, we don't have time for this. We should be training. Or strategizing. Or, or…something! We can't just do nothing."

"We're not doing nothing," he said, his smile unfaltering. "We're taking care of each other."

"Steven!" she fumed, feeling her cheeks puff. "Do you remember what Pyrite did to us at the landing pad? She just did it again, but worse! She tossed me like I was nothing. If it happens again, we could die. You could die! I won't let that happen."

A hint of discontent creased his brow. "'We' won't let that happen," he said. Then his brow smoothed and his smile blossomed in full once more. "But part of training is resting. We won't be ready if we're tired and frazzled."

"I'm not frazzled," she shot back, folding her arms.

"You're frazzled," he informed her. "On a scale of One to Frazzled, you're at about an eleven. Maybe even a twelve."

"I…" The anger in her half-hollow pushed its threads deeper into her, demanding that she change into her training outfit and find a sword. But the sandwiches in her stomach felt pleasantly heavy, splitting her resolve down the middle between comfort and motivation. Steven, with his book and his cushion, threatened to be the tipping point. "But…"

"I'm your coach, right?" he reminded her. "And I'm with you on this adventure every step of the way. But it's a marathon, Connie, not a sprint."

Her anger put up a magnificent fight. It tingled all the way down to her fingertips, demanding a weapon. It put jitters in her legs and down her spine. In the end, though, it could do nothing against the power of Steven's smile. So it retracted its tendrils into its half-hollow nest, rumbling, but asleep.

Connie knelt at the edge of the empty cushion. "Okay," she sighed.

He grinned. "Okay," he echoed. "Now, lie down."

She did so, awkwardly sidling her wet hair. Her scalp rested next to his crossed ankles, and she watched his grin widen upside-down. "What now?" she asked.

"Now you close your eyes and do nothing," he said. "If you do start booking, tell me right away and we'll stop. But otherwise, if I do the reading for you, we both get to enjoy the book again. Win-win."

She couldn't help but smirk up at him. "Nobody's read to me since I was four," she admitted.

"Then you're way overdue," he said, beaming. "Are you comfy?"

She shifted on the cushion. "Pretty comfy. If I had known what you were planning, I would have grabbed my pillow," she said.

His brows dropped. "Oh." As he considered her head, his cheeks reddened. "If you want, you could… Um, never mind. I'll go get you a pillow."

Reaching up, she touched his knee to keep him from rising. "What were you going to say?"

His blush spread up to the tips of his ears. "I was going to say that you could use me. My legs, I mean," he admitted, looking away. "I wasn't thinking. It's fine if—"

"My hair's wet," Connie blurted. Steven's blush was truly amazing, because it had somehow spread all the way to Connie's face too. She could feel the heat pouring through her cheeks. "I wouldn't want to get you all soggy. That's all. I mean, if you…"

She could hear him swallow hard. "I don't mind," he mumbled.

As hard as her heart had pounded back in the clutches of her anger, or out of fear as she'd sailed over the battlefield, it seemed to Connie as though her chest might explode as she scooted herself up the cushion to lay her head in Steven's lap. She could feel his muscles shifting to accommodate her. The warmth of him blazed through his jeans, warming her damp hair instantly.

"Good?" he said.

"Mm-hmm," she hummed, not trusting her voice while her insides fluttered.

"Good," he squeaked. Then he cleared his throat and instructed, "Now, close your eyes."

When she did, she heard him shuffling things around. Ukulele music began to play once more, this time tinnily from a source next to them. His phone, she realized. The sound of rifling pages sent a little thrill through her body, and she couldn't help smiling.

"Chapter One: The Morning Thief," he began in a resonant tone, speaking just a little slower than he normally would. "Lisa awoke with a start, the echoes of her dreams still dancing in her mind. The low rumble of thunder murmured through the quiet house."

The words Steven spoke felt familiar, but not with the certainty that came from her booking power. They were familiar, yet delightfully unfamiliar, changed in the cadence of Steven's voice and his choice of emphasis for the way he read each sentence. Pillowed in his touch, she let her favorite story wash over her, feeling half of herself sink into contentment.

Her anger nestled in the other half, in the seething half-hollow where it now took root to grow and seethe out of sight. Today it would lay at rest. But tomorrow? Tomorrow, and many days after, would belong to the anger.

Chapter Text

White foam kissed the bottoms of her feet as Connie raced onto the surf. She ran under a sky of stars, a black canvas so filled with points of brilliance that it shone like daylight. Every wave from the shore to the dark horizon glinted, roiling out of nothing to brush across the sand. And in their grasp, a thousand different treasures rose and fell, peering out from the water, just waiting for her, bobbing for her attention.

The seascape and its perpetual night felt like a second home to Connie now. It took several tries, and a lot of insomnia, but she had finally slept her way back to the dream beach that she and Jade had created together. Just like she'd hoped, the book she had pulled out of the dream ocean had remained on the sand, waiting for her, with its innumerable sister volumes still in the water, waiting to be saved.

Connie scooped another book out of the water and tucked it with the others under her arm. She could rescue entire stacks of books with each trip now, again and again, until the pile of books became the beacon on the shore that guided her back to where she started. The night air hung cool and still over the ocean, but her running swept a breeze through her hair, urging her forward, exhilarating her. Every time she ran up the crest of a wave and felt her toes leave the white foam edge at the top, she reveled in the feeling, as though she were flying above the ocean, her legs wheeling in empty air, her beaming face glistening in the sea spray.

As she pattered back onto the sand, she lifted her stack, pushing all of the books to the top of the pile save for one. With every stack, she held back one of the rescued books to examine it, trying to decode whatever it was trying to tell her. She knelt before a half-circle of the open books on the sand and added the new book into the array. Holding her breath, she opened the book, pressing both covers into the sand to splay the pages.

Gibberish. Like the others. Some of the books featured pictograms she couldn't decode with no text to explain them. Other books had nothing but text, random letters in lines that ran lengthwise and crosswise and sometimes spilled over each other in ways that made their nonsense illegible. Still other books were filled with glyphs the likes of which Connie had never seen, and could only recognize them as a language based on how they were arranged. This latest book depicted a circle on each page. The same perfect circle, over and over, for no reason Connie could decipher.

She groaned, tilting her face in her hands. One of these books had to have an answer for her. They were from Jade. Or, somehow, they were meant for Jade. Either way it made them Connie's responsibility.

Lifting her gaze to the ocean, she wiped the frustration from her eyes and scowled. Hundreds of books still bobbed in the water, waiting for her rescue. One of them would have the key to understanding this mystery. She knew it. She had to believe it. And until she had tried every single one of them, she would keep trying.

When she reached for another book, she felt sand rasping where she touched the page. Connie grimaced and tried to brush her hands clean on her shorts. The books seemed impervious to sand, water, tearing, or any other kind of damage, but trying to read them on the beach was getting messy. She wished she had some surface on which she could organize her studies, like a table, but she was afraid if she left the beach to find something, she might not be able to find her way back before the dream ended.

Something green teased the corner of her eye. She turned, thinking she had misplaced one of the books, and then froze in surprise as she found a perfect square of fabric spread out over the sand behind her. It was Jade's sailcloth, smooth and soft and metallic. A perfect option sans furniture. Too close to be anything but meant for her.

Had she created it in the dream? Had someone else created it for her?

Determinedly, Connie gathered her books one by one onto the sailcloth, ready to double her efforts. The last book lay just out of reach, forcing her to crawl for it.

"Connie?" the last book said. Its cover flapped as it spoke, its pages bending around the sound of her name.

She yelped in surprise and scrambled backwards on all fours, waiting with wide eyes to see what the book did next. Of all the things she had tried, she'd never thought to simply ask the books for answers.

The book hopped forward on the sand, using its bottom cover to jump. "Connie? Are you awake?" it said.

Her eyes widened as she recognized the voice. She leapt forward to pile her hands onto the book's cover and pin it silent, but it suddenly seemed too far away to reach.

"Wake up, sleepyhead!" the book teased.

Connie gasped, jerking awake in the confines of her blanket nest. Her cot clattered back onto all four legs as she flopped backwards, groaning softly. When she rubbed her eyes clear, she saw Steven behind her cot, already dressed for the day. His smile shone brighter than the morning glare coming from the window.

"Good morning, sleepyhead," he teased her again.

"Whuhtymizit?" Connie mumbled.

"Almost nine o'clock," he said, stepping back from the cot. Even through her blurry eyes, she could see that he looked worried.

Hurriedly, Connie wiped the grumblings out of her face and plastered a smile over it instead. "Good morning!" she chirped. "Sorry I slept so long. Thanks for waking me up."

"That's okay. You must have really needed it after yesterday," he said.

Connie bit back her reaction, feeding it into her half-hollow. Her smile widened, and she said, "I guess I can skip my run for one day."

He practically bounced, as though he could fish her out of her bed with nothing but his smile. "Well, don't skip on breakfast. I had an amazing idea for what to do today. You're going to love it!" Flouncing back toward the kitchen, he paused just long enough to add, "And if you get cold again, we can find you more blankets."

"Cold?" Connie said. The summer heat would have been too much to bear at night without the beach house's ocean breeze. The last thing she needed was another blanket. "Why would you think I was…"

She looked down into her lap. Jade's sailcloth had manifested over her while she'd slept. Even bigger than last time, this sailcloth reached the floor with each of its corners. Its edge bunched in her fist as she pulled it down her legs, frowning at the unwanted blanket.

"You can lounge in bed if you want," Steven called in a singsong voice, already pouring her morning bowl of It's Bran, "but I promise you won't want to. Because today's the day we get you a new sword!"

The words broke her façade for a genuine smile this time. A halo of motes surrounded her as the sailcloth evaporated, dismissed. "A new sword? Really?" she asked, rolling out of her cot to chase after him. "How?"

"I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner. This will be great!" Steven exclaimed as he slid off Lion.

Connie sidled down Lion's flank after Steven, and her hiking boots splashed into the tepid waters covering the cavern floor. A light chill nipped at the air, but she had prepared with long sleeves and long pants, the bottoms of which grew instantly soggy. She was beyond noticing such paltry corporeal inconveniences, however, as she stood once more inside a piece of history.

As Lion padded to find a dry outcropping fit for napping, Steven led her the enormous circular platform of metallic crystal at the center of the cavern, the home of the secret Armory of Rose Quartz. The platform cast gentle illumination throughout the cavern, powered by some inexhaustible ancient technology housed within it, which banished any shadows underfoot and cast them instead against the far stone walls and the jagged ceilings high above. As she followed, she heard their footfalls echoing in the caves and tunnels far beyond, playing in the caves and tunnels that lived beyond the edge of the light.

"You're sure this is okay?" she asked him for the tenth time. Being back in this place felt wrong to her, more now than it had the first time Lion had brought them here. Back then, this had been just another piece of Steven's magical life, another thing that separated him from her mundane life. But even since becoming part of the Crystal Gems' world, since becoming a steward of a gemstone herself, Connie still balked at entering any of Rose's spaces. This wasn't the temple, or the Sky Arena, or the strawberry battlefield. This was a place Rose had left specifically for Steven.

Steven, though, didn't share Connie's reverence as he practically danced up to the control pillar rising out of the center of the Armory. "Nine thousand and one percent," he chirped. "You need another sword. And this is the best place on the planet for swords. I think. I guess I've never really gone looking for swords before. But until Lonely Blade opens an Itsy store online, we'll try here."

Connie giggled, stuffing her uncertainty into her half-hollow where it belonged. If Steven was excited, she could act the part in kind. It wouldn't take much acting, either: she did need a weapon, and his excitement was infectious.

Slapping his hand atop the control pillar's stenciled hand, Steven leaned suavely and waggled his eyebrows. "Welcome back to L'Boutique Univers, mademoiselle. Always happy to see such a distinguished shopper returning to us. Your wardrobe already looks très chic, so may I assume you're here for an accessory?"

She bit her lip to hold in her laugh. "Did you practice that?" she choked.

"A little, in my head," admitted Steven. "Did it sound cool?"

"Nine thousand and one percent cool," she said.

"Awesome. Now," he said, and concentrated on his resting hand. His nose wiggled, and his weight shifted from foot to foot. "I think I can do this without any poking this time, but keep your fingers ready just in case. Wait… Wait… Aha!"

The disc underfoot rumbled, and pieces of the Armory's patterned surface rose upward. Clusters of weaponry floated beneath the rising platforms, spreading out into a full score of spears of different lengths, sizes, sculpts, and materials, lining themselves in the air for the teens' inspection.

"Spears?" Connie said, tilting her head. "Not swords?"

"The Spears of Pointy-ness!" Steven exclaimed in hushed awe. When Connie shot him a questioning look, he shrugged. "When Pearl brought me back here, she had important-sounding names for everything. We didn't get to these, though, so I'm making up my own." With a little effort, he tugged his hand free and glared at the control panel. "Also, this thing doesn't have a menu or anything, so it might take me a few tries."

His mild irritation fed her worry, and she hurried to stuff it into her half-hollow. Widening her smile, Connie said, "Well, hey, we can still check them out. We could find something really cool. Or maybe this is a chance for me to broaden my horizons."

Her show of enthusiasm brightened his face at once. "Yeah? Okay!" And he took her hand, leading her excitedly to the spears.

Connie's hand ghosted along the row of spears. One glittered like night, black alloy with flecks of something bright inside. The next looked like it came from a far-flung future in spite of being ancient, all clean lines and chrome so polished that Connie could see her warped reflection in it. Yet another spear looked like crystalized fire, a deep scarlet color formed into a smooth shaft and long, needle-fine point.

She reached for the red spear, but hesitated, shooting Steven a questioning look. At his excited nod, she braced herself with a deep breath, then pulled the spear out of the air. It weighed almost nothing, becoming a whorl of color around her as she spun it to gauge its feel. Her feet snapped instantly into a stance, and she swung the weapon through a brief kata. The spear tip cut deadly lines into the air around her.

But when she finished, she shook her head. "It's a great spear," she said. "They all are. But spears are already Pearl's thing. If I pick one too, my fighting style might take too much from hers. I don't think that's right." She lifted the spear back into line, uncertain if the Armory would know to take it back. But the spear seemed to know its home, and hung in the air when she finally let go.

"No problem," Steven assured her, leading her back to the control pillar. "We've got lots of stuff left to try." He slapped the panel, and the nineteen spears receded back under their panel, which sealed back into the floor.

A dozen new panels arose with a grunt of mental effort from Steven. And beneath the rising panels hovered a dozen different war hammers that gleamed in the light of the Armory. Some long, some short, each hammer featured a different and ornate head at its end.

"It's the Hammers of H-hhh… Of Hhh-umm… Hurtfulness!" Steven exclaimed.

Connie approached the nearest hammer, a tall beast of a thing whose head stood well above hers. Its strike plate had been hewn from translucent pink crystal and cut into a shallow point, capable of puncturing and smashing all at once. A pattern of prickly vines ran down the length of the haft, culminating in a blooming rose pommel at the very bottom.

When she tried to lift the hammer, the weapon refused to budge from its levitating perch. Undeterred, she grasped the cold metal even harder and closed her eyes. "You got this," she murmured to herself. "You got this."

She repeated the phrase like a mantra, taking it inside herself as her lips fell still. Releasing a slow breath, she cracked the seal on her half-hollow, freeing a piece of the snarl within. The melancholy, the self-recrimination, and all of the dark thoughts she had packed into the empty space had been heavy and slow by itself. But now that she had fed her anger into it as well, the snarl moved like lightning. It leapt out of the opening she made, super-charged by her own fury, and it was all she could do to channel the feeling through her limbs.

You got this! With that last silent cheer, Connie felt the hammer budge from its perch, hefted by Jade-powered strength. She staggered backwards with the rose hammer in hand, lifting its crystal head. It still felt heavy, but only I-shouldn't-be-swinging-this heavy instead of lifting-this-will-kill-me heavy.

Her one wobbly practice swing made her extra-sure, and she hurried to lift the hammer back under its panel. The burst of strength she'd fed herself from her half-hollow began to wane, and her arms trembled with the effort. Steven rushed to her side and, together, they put the hammer back in its place.

"It'd probably take me too long to grow into one of these," she admitted.

"Okay, but if the next thing we pull up is a bunch of giant nails, you might be sorry," Steven joked. Then he looked to her again, his head tilting in confusion. "Um, what's going on with your shirt?"

Connie looked down and jerked in surprise as she saw the front of her sweater stretching around something big and lumpy. Reaching up from the bottom, she felt a mass of fabric, and yanked it out from under the knit garment. A rumpled green sailcloth poured out, dangling in her fist.

"Whoa!" Steven exclaimed, staring agog at the sailcloth. "I know you said it came out when you and Garnet were fighting those other Gems. Does it do that on its own now?"

Grimacing, Connie smoothed the front of her sweater, trying to stuff her annoyance into her half-hollow before Steven could see it. She spared a fragment of irritation for the sailcloth, which vanished into motes in reply. "Apparently?" she said.

"Lucky!" Steven said. "It took me forever to get Mom's shield to come out when I wanted it. Your sheet can't wait to help you."

"Yeah," Connie said, pasting a grin across her face. "Lucky. Should we keep going?"

Steven returned to the panel, and the eleven hammers lowered back into the Armory. His eyes screwed shut with effort, lost in the search for something new in the collection. For a moment, Connie thought she heard the machinery rumbling. But the sound echoing off the walls actually came from Lion, who lay on his stone perch with his ears perked and a dissatisfied growl rolling through him.

They didn't have time to wonder at the grumpy cat, however, as a new array lifted out of the Armory. "Hey, speaking of shields," Steven said, "it looks like we found the Sturdy Shields of Sss…Safety. Man, this is harder than Pearl made it look."

A half-dozen shields floated up from within the Armory, their faces pointed inward to present themselves to the teens at the control pillar. Connie turned in a circle to examine the meager selection. The simplest of the shields was a petrified wooden disc lashed within an iron boss. The shield had a lovely rose icon painted on it, but she guessed that the thing had been kept for sentimental reasons rather than as part of the Armory proper. As she looked to the other shields—a tower shield with rose-patterned riveting, and a square infantry shield painted pink and white, and a medieval shield lined with white fur and depicting a purple sloth—she guessed that these were all mementos.

It made sense for the shields to be more trinkets than hardware. Of all the weapons Rose might need, a shield would never be one of them. But seeing the personal bits of history floating before her gave new life to that outsider feeling she had tried to suppress. She was perusing a memory left for Steven, and it would never feel quite right. She would never really belong in the Armory.

"Hey!" Steven's call made her stuff the feeling into her half-hollow. She turned to greet his shout with a smile, and found him with his arm around another of the shields. "This one must be sad. It's a teardrop!"

She approached the shield with an appraising eye. Made from clean iron, the shield featured a rounded top that tapered at the bottom into a sharp point. Rose petals had been etched into the surface of the curved top of its construction. "That's a kite shield," she explained, not needing her booking power for medieval battle trivia. "Armorers made them longer at the bottom to protect a mounted knight's leg."

He ran his hand down its shape appreciatively, but then jerked back with a tiny, "Ow!" A cut oozed on his fingertip. "The bottom is sharp," he complained, and popped the cut into his mouth.

Connie tested the bottom of the kite shield and was surprised to find an edge honed into the ironwork. Past the circular top, the rest of the shield was razor sharp. Circling, she inspected the back of the shield and found extra bracing down the shield's length. "This looks like it was modified to be a weapon and a shield," she marveled aloud.

"Attack and defense? Best of both worlds!" Steven said, his finger healed as it slipped from his mouth. "What do you think?"

She started to reach for the shield's handle, but then stopped. "Shields are your thing, Steven."

He looked crestfallen, insisting, "I wouldn't mind."

"But I would." She dialed up the intensity of her smile. "Just like with Pearl and her spear, remember? I need something that's mine."

"That makes sense," he admitted. Together, they returned to the control pillar. The five shields descended back into their housing, sealed away.

Across the cave, Lion lifted his head and sent a yowl at the Armory that echoed across the walls.

"Somebody's grouchy," Steven remarked. But his excitement returned as the next batch of weapons lifted out of the Armory to hover before them. "Ooh! The Axes of Ages! That one's easy, though, since Pearl already named them."

Connie looked at the ten axes floating before them. All of them were giant, two-handed monstrosities, with reach and sharpness to spare. The double-headed axe caught her eye immediately. She couldn't help but think of a similar axe, one that Pyrite had used to humiliate her.

Her anger built faster than she could ferry it into her half-hollow. "Definitely not," she said, folding her arms.

"How do you know unless you try it?" Steven goaded her. But then he looked twice, and the playfulness fell out of his voice. "Hey, are you okay?"

Once started, the memories would not relent. She remembered Pyrite's smirk from when the showy soldier Gem had packed her in Jade's sailcloth, and the ease with which Pyrite had tossed her across the entire battlefield. It had been all Connie could do to keep that two-headed axe from cleaving her down the middle.

She breathed deeply, wringing her anger out of the memories and stuffing it into her half-hollow. Don't make Steven worry, she scolded herself. You got this. You got this.

"I'm okay," she said aloud, forcing a smile.

"Your gemstone…" he said.

"Jade's gemstone," she corrected him automatically. Then she looked down, irritated, and saw the front of her sweater swelling again. Huffing, she dragged another sailcloth out from under her clothes and shook it into motes.

Steven looked unconvinced, but he thankfully didn't press the issue. Instead, he returned to the panel, and they watched the nine axes return to storage.

As Connie watched him concentrate on the panel once more, she felt something furry slide under her dangling hand. Lion had abandoned his napping spot to slink under her touch, collecting the attention that was his due as he rubbed himself along her side with his nose up in the air. She chuckled softly as she scritched his flank. "Are we being too noisy, Lion?" she cooed.

"That would be a first. I've seen him sleep through one of Sour Cream's sets. Ditto a bunch of big life-or-death Gem fights," Steven said. He tapped his pinkie on the panel, and then cried in success. "I think I got it!"

A circular column rose opposite them at the far end of the Armory, and then reticulated open to unleash a cloud of swords. Reverently, Connie approached, her eyes wide and heart pounding.

Her innards tightened as she stepped among the blades. The first time she had seen them so long ago, in the distant past of the year before, she'd been impressed beyond words. What fan of action-oriented fantasy wouldn't love the idea of stumbling across a magical arsenal? But with the benefit of Pearl's training she could now see the expertise in the blades, and it took her breath away.

Her training sabers had quality to spare, no doubt. But these blades had personality. They had panache!

Her fingers brushed against an old cutlass in a tattered leather scabbard. The thick grip had been wrought with a brass skull and crossbones, and had two pink stones filling the little skull's eye sockets. It moved with her touch before drifting back into position, and as it bobbed she admired the heft of its design. Cutlasses were blunt instruments made for hacking through bone. But bones weren't an issue in a Gem fight—at least none except her own, and maybe Steven's—and anyway, hacking and slashing didn't fit with her style.

Next she came across a beautiful daishō. The pair of blades floated independent of their sheathes, revealing the water pattern of their folded steel ripple in the Armory's light. The longer katana tapered into a graceful point with more than enough reach to make a foe think twice about stepping too close. And the wakizashi had a longer grip than normal, ready for a two-handed grip if fighting grew too close and personal, or if its wielder were perhaps not an eight-foot Quartz. The blades' grips were woven from the same black fabric interlaced with pink thread that, were the blades worn together, would form a rosebud pattern.

The swords were works of deadly art that demanded the highest precision to use. If anything, they would be too precise: folded steel possessed remarkable strength, but also brittleness. One wrong move could shatter either blade, which would never work for the rough, chaotic kind of fighting that Gem combat entailed. She admired the swords, but she knew she couldn't use them.

But then…

Connie lost her breath all over again to the beautiful specimen floating before her. Crafted from steel so blue that it looked like a slice of morning sky, the enigma before her defied any definition Connie tried to put to it. It wasn't a claymore, nor a broadsword, nor a feder, but it nonetheless possessed elements of each of those swords and more: it boasted a double-edge blade fitted into an inverted V-shaped crossguard that would be ideal for deflection and counterattack, seemingly built with fencing in mind, but its blade was too broad for traditional riposting, and its rose blossom pommel and thick profile boasted plenty of mass for heavy swings.

She had loved Rose's sword. But that hulking weapon had been made for Rose, a massive Quartz with strength to match her size, which made it a challenge to which Connie had been forced to rise. The sword before her was no challenge, but instead a glove that had waited thousands of years for her to find it and discover its perfect fit.

"Whoa!" Steven whispered, slinking around the opposite side of the sword. "Tempest Rain!"

"It has a name?" Connie exclaimed in a hush.

"Well, probably not," admitted Steven. "But, I mean, just look at it. Don't you think…?"

Her mind had already locked the name to the sword. "You're getting really good at the naming thing," she whispered distractedly. Slowly she reached up, her skin thrumming as it drew closer to the white wrapping at the hilt. Her fingertips brushed the tight fibers.

"Your old sword was much better. I've been meaning to thank you for giving it to me."

Connie jerked her hand back from Tempest Rain like it had been burned as Pyrite's taunt rang in her ears.

"What is it?" Steven asked, leaning around the sword to look at her hand. "Is it magic? Is it like an Excalibur thing? Do we have to find a one true king of England?"

"No. I mean, I don't know. It's not that," Connie said. She rubbed her hand up and down her sleeve, unable to meet Steven's worried gaze. The anger and frustration spilled through her faster than she could pack it into her half-hollow. "Steven, this is your mom's."

Steven became perfectly still, the concern blanking out of his features. "I know," he said. "So?"

Connie cringed, wishing she hadn't said anything. "I already lost her sword. 'The' sword. Lion brought you that sword, remember?" she said, and gestured to the big cat, who had his gaze turned imperiously to the ceiling. "This things she left behind is important. It's too important to let me just… I don't want to be the reason you lose something you can't replace. Again."

He didn't answer for several moments, watching her from the other side of Tempest Rain. As the silence piled atop her, lashed across her shoulders like a colossal weight, Connie started to turn away. But she stopped when Steven grasped Tempest Rain and pushed it toward her, offering her its hilt.

"I'm never going to run out of things that mom left me," Steven told her solemnly. "It's in everything I have, and everyone still around, like my Dad, and the Gems. It's everything she left unfinished, all the things that everyone wants me to be or do because she's gone. But this? This is just stuff. And right now, it can help someone I really care about. Someone I could never replace, even if I managed to find a hundred true kings of England."

Connie felt the anger in her evaporate, flitting into her stomach like a swarm of butterflies. "Steven…" she murmured.

He beamed at her and offered her the sword's hilt again. "At least try it on before you say no. We here at L'Boutique Univers guarantee satisfaction or your money back."

For the first time all day, Connie didn't have to try as she returned his smile in kind. She grasped Tempest Rain and knew in an instant that she had found her sword. Her body moved in tune with the weight and shape of the blade like it was part of her. She took it through a piece of kata, and the blade drew bright blue arcs in the air. Its balance was perfect, its weight an ideal match for her speed and strength.

She ended the kata breathless, not exhausted but elated. Holding the blade aloft, she said, "Don't bother wrapping it up. I'll wear it home!"

Steven clapped and whistled. "Brava! It looks great on you." His face softened, and he added, "And I know you'll take great care of it."

"I promise," she said solemnly.

Lion rose from the pink crystal of the Armory, his teeth bared and his throat bubbling with a growl.

Connie gave the cat a surprised look, and started to ask Steven about the odd behavior when something clacked above her. Looking up at the sword she held overhead, Connie saw a thick pink tendril wrapped around the blade, heedless of its razor edge. A conical gray tip topped the end of the tendril, clicking noisily against the blue steel. Then the tendril tightened, and Tempest Rain tore free of Connie's grasp, vanishing into the distant shadows of the ceiling where the tendril withdrew.

"Um, okay," Steven said, laying a hand on Lion's side as the great cat padded forward to stalk around the teens protectively. "I'm not mad, but I kinda thought that sword would last you longer. What just happened?"

Dumbstruck, Connie could only stare in shock at her empty hand and the thieving darkness above.

Chapter Text

Connie prided herself on feeling prepared for the weirdness that came from being with the Crystal Gems. Certainly in the early days, when some stranger had trapped her in a bubble and become her best friend while they'd battled a giant glowniverous worm-monster, she could forgive herself for being overwhelmed. And yes, when her eyes had been magically healed by backwash, or when she'd nearly drowned on dry land in a battle to reclaim the ocean, she'd been unprepared. Bewildered, even. But those strange happenings had become her new normal, a normal that she now cherished, a normal that she felt ready to face, knowing what to expect.

That new normal had not, however, prepared her for the idea of a ceiling to steal the new sword she had fallen in love with only moments ago. And yet, there she stood, sword-less and trying to construct a new-new normal for herself that could gauge the trustworthiness of ceilings going forward.

Lion rose to glower at the ceiling. White fangs flashing, he roared, and the sound became a pulse of energy that pounded the stone above. The whole cave shook with the force of his echoing voice.

A shower of pebbles fell out of the darkness, forcing Connie to Steven's side as he manifested a shield into a makeshift umbrella. Through the fading echo and the steady patter of stone on shield, Connie heard a crack thundering through thick rock. Looking up, she shrank in horror as she watched stalactites break free of the ceiling. "Steven!" she screamed.

Steven dragged her into Lion's side, and a pink bubble shield enveloped all three of them. He summoned another shield to his off hand for good measure, putting it between them and the hail of stone spears.

The stalactites exploded into jagged shrapnel as they struck the Armory. Connie winced as their barrier rippled beneath an onslaught of stone. Their bubble wobbled, bowed inward, but held, and resumed its shape as the last of the stalactites hammered into the crystal alloy. Somehow, the final fallen stalactite kept its shape, landing on its side with a tremendous thunk that shook the Armory beneath them.

As the stone rain abated, Steven let his bubble evaporate, and dismissed his shields with a motion. He took a cautious step toward the lone intact stalactite, each step grinding against the rubble underfoot. "Guess you really 'brought down the house,' huh, Lion?" he said.

Connie straightened, feeling silly for flinching. What was ducking going to do to protect her that Steven's shields couldn't? She tucked the self-recrimination into her half-hollow to keep her voice light as she said, "That is one tough stalactite. None of the other ones survived the fall."

"Now that it's on the ground, isn't it a stalagmite?" Steven said cheekily.

Lion brushed past the two teens, advancing on the conical stone shaft. A low growl rumbled through the cat as his mane puffed and his tail bristled. His predatory crouch put Connie back on her guard, and she looked around, trying to find whatever could put a five hundred pound predator into such a tizzy. With her senses on alert, she was nearly ready when the fallen stalactite, now a stalagmite, stood up, forcing her to find a new-new-new normal on the fly.

Rough lines snapped along the conical stone's length with a sound like a gunshot. The lines came together into four long segments of stone that pushed free from the rest of the stalagmite, bleeding gravel as they unfurled into segmented limb. Extending outward from the cone, the limbs bent, spider-like, and pushed the stone off the floor, swinging the tip upward and lifting the base of the stalagmite off the floor. Only the outsides of the legs were rocky, like armor plating made from chunks of the cavern itself. The body underneath the rock and the inside of the legs were made of some dark, glossy, vaguely reflective material.

Lion crouched and arched his back at the stone monster's rising. His roar shook the cavern again, knocking more loose stone from the ceiling. Connie flinched again, flashing a terrified look above, expecting to see another stalactite hurtling toward her, but it was only dust and pebbles spilling over them.

The stalagmite reared back on its spider legs, tipping its base toward Lion, revealing more reflecting innards under the rim of its broken base. The center of the base irised open, spilling a red glow across the floor of the Armory as it revealed a well of deep, roiling red-white liquid heat. Sharp teeth lined the inner edge of the well, spreading wide as the mouth answered Lion's roar with its own shrill, shrieking noise.

Steven re-summoned his shield and squared off against the creature. His other hand reached for Connie seemingly on reflex, and she took it without thinking. Pink light flared under his shirt, and his touch prickled in hers as she braced herself to become part of someone else.

Nothing happened.

Shock gave way to exasperation as Connie pulled her hand out of Steven's. Part of her had hoped that the need of battle might bring Stevonnie back into the world. But Stevonnie hadn't been born out of combat, and expecting the fusion to work just because of a fight made her feel that much worse that it hadn't happened. She stuffed her disappointment and frustration into her half-hollow, feeling them join the nasty snarl inside of it.

She tried to play off the fusion failure, grinning to allay Steven's worried look before she rushed past him. "Guess I can't be picky anymore," she quipped. Jumping through the cloud of floating weapons, she landed with a longsword in her grasp, her sneakers skittering into a ready stance atop the rubble.

Lion circle the spidery creature, and then pounced. With the big cat for scale, the creature looked a little less intimidating, standing only a little bit taller than Lion, and only then thanks to its spindly tip. Lion bared his fangs and loosed his claws, falling upon the creature in a storm of sharp points. Little chunks of gravel jetted out from under Lion's claws, but the creature didn't seem to care. Try as the cat might, he couldn't pierce the stone skin of the stalagmite or work his jaws around its curve, only managing to scrape thin lines into its body with the attempt.

The tip of the creature sprang upwards, driven out from the body atop a thick column of pinkish material. Connie recognized the extension and its stone tip as the thing that had ripped Tempest Rain out of her grasp. Even as her brain connected to the moment before, the tendril lashed out, knocking Lion across the floor to land in a heap next to Steven.

As it tilted back again, the creature's scream withered into a cough, and its glowing mouth flared. Something red and bright arced from the mouth and struck the Armory near Lion, forcing him back to avoid the splash. The substance hissed and darkened quickly, hardening into a blob that glistened under the Armory's light.

"She's got a tongue on her head and a mouth in her butt," Steven said, grimacing as he eased Lion back with a hand on the cat's side. "No wonder she's so angry."

"So it is a corruption, right?" Connie said, sidling next to Steven. Together, they watched the stone creature skitter away from them, its interest captured by the cloud of swords instead.

"She must be," he agreed, "but I don't see her gemstone. And her outside looks like it's made out of actual rock. You think she was buried when she re-formed her body?"

The creature's stone-tipped tongue extended once more and wrapped around the skull-and-crossbones cutlass that Connie had rejected before. Yanking it out of the air, the creature brought the cutlass down to her under-mouth and stuffed the blade inside, chewing noisily. The sound of breaking metal filled the air, then subsided into burbling as the creature digested her meal.

"Hey!" Steven cried. "We weren't done with those!"

"She couldn't have just formed inside of the rock, could she?" Connie touched Jade's gemstone through her sweater, remembering that first day when she thought the Gem might explode out of her as she reconstituted. Then, looking up, Connie realized the answer. "She was already formed! She wanted the stuff inside the Armory, so she waited here for thousands of years. The natural condensation formed a stalactite around her because she wouldn't move!"

Steven's wide eyes swiveled from the ceiling to the creature. "She wanted all of Mom's stuff, so she waited that long? But why didn't she grab it when we came before? Wouldn't she have woken up the first time?"

"Spoken like somebody who's never hit the snooze button on a school day," Connie retorted.

Steven toed the lump that the creature had spat, then jerked his foot back with a hiss. "It's still molten! I think this is the metal she's been eating. She just chews it up and spits it out?"

Icy comprehension gripped Connie's stomach as she connected the events before and after the creature's emergence. She looked again at the cooling wad of metal the creature had spat at them. It might have been her imagination, but she thought she could see little swirls of blue in the chalky gray metal. "She ate Tempest Rain?" she cried. "She ate my sword! And she just spit it out as slag!"

"I guess that makes her a Slag Mite instead of a stalagmite," Steven said.

The creature probed for another meal, finding a gladius. It sucked the weapon into its bottom and began to chew, its tongue already on the prowl for the next bite.

"Those aren't yours!" Connie cried. Lifting her longsword, she ran at the corruption. Her sneakers pounded the Armory's iridescent face, resounding like a war drum as she tilted into a full charge. Her focus narrowed until the world became exquisitely simple: there was just her, the sword in her hands, and the foe before her.

Anger and frustration lanced out of her half-hollow and reached all the way to her fingertips and toes, filling her with Gem strength. The longsword became a silver arc in her grasp, sweeping through the creature's leg, and she felt a satisfying thud as her run carried her beyond her target. She spun atop the rubble to witness her grim handiwork, a fierce grin cutting across her face.

The Slag Mite hadn't even noticed the attack. Her attention went to a freshly broken blade that clattered beneath her. Using her sweeping tongue, the Mite scooped up the broken blade and chomped it into her under-mouth.

Connie stared in disbelief at the utter dearth of injury to her foe, and then down at the stub of a sword in her hands. The blade had broken cleanly off of its crossguard, leaving her with an ornate pommel and an empty hilt. Medieval craftwork evidently hadn't anticipated Gem combat. "Ugh!" she snarled.

The stone tip of the Mite's tongue slapped her hands, knocking the hilt out of her grasp, and then knocked Connie off her feet with a lazy backswing.

Steven was at her side before she had landed. He puffed breathlessly from his run as he'd chased her across the floor. He manifested a shield to protect them both, but the Slag Mite had already returned her attention to consuming the array of floating swords, pausing briefly to gobble up the hilt of the longsword.

"She's pretty focused on her next meal. Guess thousands of years can make you snack-y," Steven said as he helped Connie to her feet.

The crunch of the Mite gobbling up an oversized kukri made Connie's insides seethe. "We can't just let her eat them!" Connie insisted.

As she spoke, she saw a green glow crease the bottom of her vision, and she felt her sweater suddenly grow too tight. She reached under the hem and yanked out Jade's sailcloth. But her irritation quickly turned, becoming inspiration as she looked down at the fabric draped from her fist.

Grabbing the top two corners of the cloth, Connie lifted the edge of the sailcloth beneath her chin. Then she ran, heedless of Steven's alarmed cry behind her. She let the breadth of the cloth drape back against her with the force of her momentum. Drifting from side to side, she ran until the floating swords formed a straight line ahead of her. Then she jumped.

The Slag Mite's tongue reached for another blade as Connie sailed through the cloud. Thump! Thump! One by one, the swords hammered against Connie's chest with the cloth between as she sailed over the Armory floor. She had leapt as hard as she could, hoping to gather a few of the swords in her arms before landing, never dreaming that she could save them all. Yet somehow, impossibly, her leap carried her through the entire line to the last sword, which clattered with the rest inside her makeshift cloth net.

When her soles touched floor, she crossed the sailcloth corners up to her shoulders, wrapping the blades inside to create a bundle. She staggered at the weight hugged to her chest and spun, checking to see the Slag Mite's reaction. Then her eyes went wide and she kept spinning, lurching into a full run with the Slag Mite skittering on her heels, under-mouth snapping with fury at the thief who had stolen her meal.

"Connie!" Steven cried. "Serpentine!"

She could barely hear him running after them over the clattering of the Mite's pursuit. Those stony spider feet hammered the floor like a drumroll, and Connie imagined she could feel the heat of the creature's mouth burning the ends of her trailing hair.

With the edge of the Armory looming closer with every step, Connie readied herself for another jump into the murky shallows below. But before she could make the leap, she saw a blur of pink sweeping over the cave floor, and she staggered backwards to avoid the spray as Lion skidded overtop the water. The cat's roar coalesced into another wave of light that spun Connie, narrowly missing her to slam into the Slag Mite. The Mite tumbled backward and bounced across the width of the Armory. Her scream vanished behind the echoing roar and another rain of pebbles from above that shook the entire mountain.

Steven rolled out of the way of the Mite as it tumbled, narrowly avoiding his end beneath its crash beyond the opposite end of the Armory. Then he rolled again to avoid a smaller stalactite that broke free and pounded the alloy next to him. "Lion, stop!" he wailed. "You're gonna bring the house down for real this time!"

Lion grumbled, but held his volume as he climbed the Armory and poised himself to shield Connie from the pebble rain. His dark eyes locked onto the Mite as she hauled herself out of the shallows, heaving her bulk back onto her spidery legs.

As Steven circled around Lion to join her, Connie laid her bundle across the ground, smooth out the sail beneath it. "I was hoping you'd have more time to pick out your new sword. And, y'know, less imminent danger," Steven said, panting. "Which one will it be?"

Connie stared down at the pile of ancient blades. Each one was a treasure, an artifact of history and, more importantly, a gift from the mother Steven had never known. But Connie knew that none of them had the strength needed to pierce the Slag Mite's rocky hide. Even the lost sword of Rose Quartz might have balked at cutting through solid rock, and none of the other blades were nearly so well crafted.

She needed a blunt instrument. One of those hammers might have done the trick, but she doubted the Mite would give Steven the time to call them back from the Armory. Already, the creature gathered herself for another charge, coughing up a fresh metal wad to hurl at them.

At least nothing inside the Armory had suffered any damage. As her hands brushed past the edge of the sailcloth, Connie had to marvel at the perfect surface underneath the scattered rubble around them. The glowing alloy hadn't suffered a single scratch or dent in all of the commotion.

And just like that, Connie knew how to beat the Slag Mite. She looked up at Steven, grimacing apologetically. "All of them? Sorry."

A flash of surprise crossed his face before he hardened with resolve. "What's the plan?" he said.

Chewing on her lip, Connie pulled at the edge of the sailcloth. "I might not have one, really. What I have in mind won't work with this thing being so small—"

Even as she said it, the edges of the sailcloth fluttered, chasing her and Steven back a step. As Connie watched, the sides of the sailcloth unfurled from beneath it, revealing new corners that had seemingly been folded underneath. And before those new corners settled, the new sides of the cloth unfurled again in the same way, producing new corners that fluttered onto the Armory floor. Like origami in reverse, the sheet had unfolded itself to become eight times its original size.

Connie blinked. She hadn't even realized the sheet was folded when she'd first manifested it. As she touched it again, the sheet felt just as thick as it had before. She wanted to know from where these new corners had unfolded themselves, but there wasn't time to wonder such things at the moment.

"Um, okay," she said, stepping to the new edge of the cloth. "Lion, let it through. Steven, stick close. Step in if it looks like I'm dying or whatever."

His shield manifested as Steven bent low, backing out of arm's reach. "I'll probably step in before that starts happening," he said.

"Not sure if this is the kind of plan with a lot of room between 'dead' and 'winning,' but we'll stay positive," Connie muttered, and crouched at the sailcloth's edge.

The Armory quaked as the Slag Mite scurried forward. A drizzle of smelted metals trailed behind her, and her tongue lashed wildly in front of her, knocking the stalactite cap against the floor in search of her missing meal.

Against every instinct screaming for her to run, Connie held her ground. She shook the cloth by its edge, jiggling the sword pile enticingly. The rattle of swords spurred the Slag Mite into dashing straight into Connie's waiting trap.

Metal screeched on metal as the Slag Mite stopped, poising her under-mouth above the pile. Her tongue clacked against the tangle of blades. At last satisfied, the Slag Mite snatched up a rose-tipped epée and devoured it. Connie let the crunching noises cover her footfalls as she crept and gathered each of the sailcloth's nearest corners. Then, as the Mite crunched greedily on more precious heirlooms, Connie gathered herself low, and jumped.

With the sail's corners balled in her fists, Connie held her breath, hoping her jump would be enough. Her body arched backwards to roll above the top of the rocky corruption, treating it like the bar in a deadly track-and-field high jump, a bar that could crush her with its body or immolate her with its barf. The writhing tongue at the top lashed close, terrifyingly close, but she cleared it with a hair's breadth to spare.

She landed hard on the other side of the corruption, still clinging to the sail, which billowed over the top of the Mite. Before the creature could realize what had happened, Connie scrambled for the other two corners of the sail. With all four corners in hand, Connie wrenched her whole body around, yanking as hard as she could, jerking the Mite off her feet and trapping the corruption inside an enormous makeshift bindle made from sailcloth.

Connie kept twisting, her sneakers skittering against the rubble-strewn Armory as she tried to swing the bindle into motion. Gem strength, Gem strength, Gem strength! she screamed inside of herself. Her half-hollow spilled lightning into her arms and legs, turning her human body into an engine of pure strength. Slowly, impossibly, the bindle began to slide across the floor.

But it would not swing. No matter how she pulled, or cursed, the cloth never left the floor. Its prisoner writhed and screamed inside the fabric, thrashing until one of those spidery legs slipped through a gap in the bindle. Then another leg slipped free. And another. The craggy limbs flailed, hammering against the floor, pushing back against Connie's pull.

Sweat rolled down Connie's face like tears. "I…can't…!" she strained, feeling her body twist to the breaking point, a bowstring about to fray and snap.

Strong hands brushed over hers. She looked up to find Steven next to her, wrapping his fists around the bundled fabric just above where she gripped it. His shoulder pressed against hers as they stood side-by-side. "We can," he told her. And he pulled.

Feeling Steven beside her sent a surge through Connie. Her feet moved with his, and his body swung around to stay with her. Even without Stevonnie, Connie and Steven knew how to move as one.

Rock screeched on metal as the creature's legs slipped free of the floor, and the bindle dragged the Slag Mite screaming across the Armory. Stepping in time, the teens spun the tremendous impromptu sack, clutching tightly to the corners, rotating around the point where their hips met side-by-side. As they gathered dizzying momentum, the bindle actually lifted off the ground with the creature still inside, pinned in her cloth prison by sheer centripetal acceleration.

Wordlessly, Connie guided their combined hold on the cloth even higher. The room blurred around them, the air whistling in her ears. She lifted their arms higher, higher. A scream resounded deep in her chest, shaking her all the way to Jade's gemstone. Then she swung the bindle up and over their heads and brought its momentum to crash into the Armory floor.

A crystalline sound gonged throughout the cavern, so loud that it knocked the two teens off their feet and loosed the fabric from their grasp. Connie scrambled backwards and jumped to her feet with her fists raised and her ears ringing. Panting, shaking, she watched the lumpy fabric before them for any signs of fight. But the green sailcloth remained silent and still.

Steven crawled forward to pull away the green shroud. He yelped and jerked back as steam belched up from the opening. The fabric draped to one side, revealing a glob of pinkish-white ooze resting in a nest of broken stone. It was the metal the Slag Mite had eaten, now absent a body to contain it.

Through the glare and shimmering heat that rose out of the remains, Connie saw a silver egg-shaped gemstone as big as her fist bobbing in the middle of the slag. A thatch of half-digested hilts and blades encircled the stone, rapidly cooling into solidity.

Steven cringed at the mass around the stone. "No bubbling her from that. But at least she can't reform in there. Now, how do we get her home?"

The answer came in the form of a pink halo of fur that engulfed Connie from behind. Lion had perched himself behind her to leer at their vanquished foe and claim Connie as his protectee, pressing his chest to her back. He ran his rough tongue through her hair, grooming out the bits of stone wedged in it while she and Steven shared a look.

Working together, Connie and Steven heaved the cold metal lump out of Lion's glowing mane and onto the floor of the Burning Room. It clattered loudly before settling onto its flattest side with the egg-shaped gemstone peeking out of the lumpy nest of hilts.

As soon as their work was done, Lion stood and strutted imperiously to the lava pool at the center of the room. He thumped onto the floor with his body pressed along one of the room's glowing veins. From what Connie could tell, Lion had fallen asleep before he even landed.

Steven wiped his brow as he stared down at the silver stone wedged in the metal. "Not your standard bubble, but at least she'll be safe here for now."

Connie barely nodded in reply. Her eyes were fixed in the lump, her stomach twisting as she recognized the half-melted grip and guard of Tempest Rain inside the mass. "Sorry about your mom's swords," she said. "I wish there was a way we could fix them somehow…"

"The only person I know who could fix any of them is already in here. And she won't be excited to do me any favors anytime soon."

The rough quality of his voice made Connie look up, and she followed his gaze to a pink bubble floating among the multicolored array of bubbles overhead. A stepped pyramid stone hung inside the bubble, its iridescent colors visible even through the pink barrier. Connie had never seen the stone before, but she knew its Gem by reputation.

Bismuth.

The story Steven had told her burbled up from her memory in pieces: Bismuth, the zealot who wanted to shatter every loyalist alive and end the war on top of a mountain of shards; Bismuth, who had been bubbled away, her absence hidden by Rose Quartz's lie; Bismuth, who had been poofed by Steven and locked away again, this time by the other Crystal Gems.

But one piece of the memory loomed larger than any other: Bismuth, blacksmith, the finest weapon-maker to ever walk the planet, and the one who had made Rose's lost sword.

"Connie?"

She shook herself out of her reverie and looked back at Steven. However long she had been staring at the bubble, she could tell by his expression that it had been too long. "Huh?"

He chewed on his bottom lip, his eyes flicking to and fro with uncertainty. Finally, hesitantly, he said, "Your plans—our plans—need to have a lot more room between 'winning' and 'dead.' "

Connie hurried to laugh. "Oh, that? I was just trying to sound cool. Guess I need more practice."

He grinned, relieved. "Maybe we can think of some cool one-liners over lunch. C'mon."

As she followed him out, she couldn't resist one last look back at the slagged weapons, and then up at the imprisoned swordsmith above it.

Chapter Text

On a lark, Connie took her morning run up the hill instead of around the beach. She felt anxious to explore the rest of the town, since almost all of her time in it had been spent at or around Steven's home. Everything that lay beyond the reach of the boardwalk and the shore was still a mystery to her, one she felt eager to unravel.

And after the fifteen minutes it had taken her to realize that the boardwalk and the beach were the only things of note in the town, she still resolved to have a nice run around its edge, just to say that she had.

The emptiness of the streets felt different than it had in the winter before. Tourist season had come at last, and the peace of the town now possessed an edge of anticipation just below the surface. Soon Beach City would become overwhelmed by dozens, perhaps even scores, of tourists eager to splash in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Ahead of these moderate throngs, the town's attractions began spooling up to receive them.

Circling the entire town didn't take long, but Connie made the most of it. She wasn't even breathing hard when she got to wave good morning to Greg Universe as he set up his car wash. She felt the hill's full fury as she ran past the amusement park's entrance and saw Mister Smiley rolling up the shutters from the ticket booth windows. By the Visitor's Center, she let herself loose, sprinting full past Mayor Dewey as the sunburnt politician arranged and rearranged a display of tourism pamphlets. Finally, she loped into her cooldown, passing by Funland Arcade, where Mister Smiley stooped behind the Manse Manse Elocution machine, booting up the popular highfalutin articulation game for its busy day.

Silently Connie made note to ask Mister Smiley for tips on improving her speed when she introduced herself properly.

A stitch burned across her ribs as she slowed to a jog. She savored the ache, grinning against the breeze that rolled past her on her way back to the house. The runner's high filled her with a personalized version of that anticipation she could feel in the city. She was healthy, free, and full of glorious summer. No matter her swordlessness, no matter her power incontinence, she felt for the first time in weeks like she could conquer the strangeness that had overwhelmed her life.

And so, naturally, Jade's sailcloth chose that moment of confidence to leap out of its gemstone home. Billowing out from all four rounded corners of the stone, the sailcloth glomped her, wrapping everything from her knees to her scalp in metallic green blindness.

Connie staggered and jerked the sailcloth out of her face. With a frustrated snarl, she tossed the cloth and tried to resume her jog. But a sudden gust of wind caught the sailcloth, flapping it back into her from behind. She nearly spilled onto the pavement trying to wrestle herself out of the clingy fabric again.

A sudden, thunderous hooonk shook her to her bones. Connie screamed and yanked the cloth away to see a big box truck stopped right in front of her, waiting to pull out of the little lot behind Fish Stew Pizza as soon as the distracted jogger moved out of its way. Hurriedly Connie stumbled to one side and waved an apology to the driver, which he ignored as his truck lurched onto the street.

She held up the sailcloth, glaring at it through the thick cloud of exhaust left in the truck's wake. "Ooh, you stupid…! I could have been killed!" she snarled, and threw the cloth as hard as she could.

It could have been the post-terror adrenaline rush, or the anger pounding in her veins, or some playfulness of the wind that Jade had never mentioned. Whatever the cause, it made the sailcloth rocket out of her hand, riding the wind like a rocket across the parking lot, where it slammed into a stack of cardboard boxes at the curb. The sail hit the top box like a comet, and a plume of white paper gore exploded, filling the air with fluffy shreds that danced in the breeze.

Connie walked numbly through the paper snowfall, gaping in horror at the destruction her cloth missile had wrought. The shreds clung to her sweatiness, sticking in her hair, framing an itchy halo around her.

"What happened?!"

The hysterical shout turned her head toward the open door at the back of Fish Stew Pizza. A man's frame filled the doorway, clothed behind a spotless white apron, and topped with a tall, tight knot of hair. Connie recognized him by reputation alone as Kofi, the pizza parlor's owner and Kiki's and Jenny's father. Her daze brain connected the open door, the stack of cardboard boxes, and the departing delivery truck, magnifying her horror to apoplectic levels.

He clasped his hands to his face, eyes wide through the snowy paper whorling in the air between them. "My napkins!" Kofi shrieked. Then his eyes narrowed on Connie, the lone survivor of the massacre. "You! You did this! Who are you?" he demanded.

The distance between Connie's brain and her mouth suddenly felt like a million miles. "I…I…I…" she stammered.

"Are you a corporate spy? One of those thugs from Original Famous Original Ray's, jealous of our superior recipe?" Kofi snarled. "You're here to steal our secret formula! To sabotage us! You plan to leave our customers' hands too messy to use their telephones to give us good reviews, don't you? Admit it!"

"What? No! I—"

His eyes narrowed, piercing the flotsam that clung to her. "Wait, I know you! You're Steven's friend!" His gaze flicked a few inches lower to the hollow of her throat. "You are also one of those bejeweled hooligans? Those, those…Bejeweligans! That is the last thing we need: another reckless super-powered menace tearing apart other people's property!"

She clutched the stone at her throat. "It's not—"

Kofi stamped his foot and jabbed at the twisted husk of cardboard that had formerly held several thousand pristine napkins. "Do you have any idea how much that box costs?" he demanded.

"H-H-H-How much?" squeaked Connie.

The number burst from his lips like a teakettle's whistle, and Connie felt the blood drain from her face. It wasn't an impossible amount of money, or even an unthinkable amount of money. But it far exceeded the week's allowance her parents had Cashmore'd into her account.

"You will reimburse this catastrophe," Kofi insisted, "or I will ban that whole house from ever seeing a single slice of pizza in this town ever again!"

"I…have pirate treasure?" Connie said. "Just let me call my—"

"No!" he exploded. "No more bejeweled shenanigans! Bejeweligans! You are all banned for life! My life, your life, and especially the lives of those colorful wrecking balls taking care of Steven! Forever!"

"No, wait!" Connie cried, reaching for him as he stormed back toward the door. The thought of a pizza-less summer was horrible enough, but to think of Steven enduring a pizza-less life? In her mind's eye she could already see him withering away to nothing without the joy and sustenance his body required from the world's most perfect food. "Please, don't ban us! I'll make this right, I promise. I'll do anything!"

She swallowed hard as she watched Kofi turn back, his face calculating the word anything with its sinister smile.

The last of the tomato sauce fell into place with a satisfying thunk. Connie wiped her brow and pushed off her knees to stand back and admire her handiwork. "All done!" she announced.

Kiki collected the empty box from Connie, breaking it down and folding it with the offhandedness of someone who had done that same job a thousand times before. "Hey, not bad," she said, appraising the dry good shelf of their tiny kitchen. "Labels are out and everything. And did you reorganize?"

Connie ducked her head at the mild praise. "Not reorganized. I just stacked everything pretty much where it was so it wasn't mixed up or buried anymore."

"Look, Daddy," Kiki called out, "now you don't have to dig to get at the tomato paste anymore."

Kofi didn't even turn his head. With dual ladles, he sauced a row of flattened pizza doughs. "Anything can be done well if you take forever to do it."

Connie cringed at the dismissal. But when she noticed Kiki rolling her eyes, she felt a little better.

"Mother! I need new sauce!" Kofi bellowed. His ladles clattered into an empty pot.

"No need to shout, Kofi," said the tiny woman scrubbing dishes at the sink. She'd introduced herself to Connie as Nanefua in the half a second they'd had before Kofi had ushered Connie to the shelf to unload the surviving cardboard boxes. "My ears are clear. My sink is a different story."

"Intern!" Kofi barked. "Dishes! Mother has more important things to do."

As Connie traded places with the old woman at the stool, Nanefua leaned close and whispered, "Don't scrub too hard. Once I left my hands in the water for too long, and they've been prune-y ever since." She held up her wrinkled fingers and winked.

Connie stifled her giggle before Kofi could glare at her. Her mirth didn't last long, however, as she gulped at the sight of the mountainous dish pile waiting next to the sink.

The world became a rush of work. Seconds, minutes, and hours all blurred together into an unceasing blob of activity demarcated only by the next dish to be washed. Connie felt like she was sprinting to keep up with the pace of the kitchen, but as fast as she could clean the plates and run them through the steam sanitizer machine, there were more hungry tourists coming in to replace those clean dishes with twice as many dirty ones.

At some point, Kiki stopped her working to offer her a bandana. Connie accepted gratefully, realizing how pathetic she must have looked with suds and sweat dripping from her face.

It gave her a chance to appreciate just how insane the lunch rush had become in the short time since she'd arrived. There seemed to be no end to people coming in, eating, talking, laughing, and leaving. Like a tide, people would move out and move in seamlessly.

But for as hard as Connie worked to keep up with it all, she couldn't help but admire the Pizza family's clockwork proficiency at handling all of the chaos. Kofi and Nanefua worked the ovens and counters, turning cold balls of dough from the walk-in and cans of tomato products into steaming, mouth-watering pies. Kiki handled the tables and the register, somehow keeping track of which customers were new, which had orders ready, and which were waiting to pay. And Jenny ran garbage and deliveries, flitting through the kitchen too quickly to notice until she was already gone with a new stack to take to the boardwalk.

Kofi especially caught Connie's attention. From the corner of her eye, she watched him conduct the kitchen like it was his orchestra, and his fearsome voice, his baton. "Sauce! Sausage! Trash! Oven! Order up!" He spoke sharply, loudly, but never angrily. Well, never angrily but for one word: "INTERN!"

Some time during the blur, as her arms grew heavy and her head felt thick, she felt a gentle hand steering her out through the back door. The cool air brushed the fuzz out of her thoughts, and she savored a long, deep breath.

"You gotta pace yourself," said Jenny, the one who had pulled Connie away from the sink. She pressed a cup of cold water into Connie's hands. "Stay hydrated and take breaks."

Connie guzzled the water, only remembering to breathe once the cup ran dry. "I just want to do a good job," said Connie. Cringing, she added, "And I don't want your dad to yell at me."

Jenny smirked. "Daddy yells at everybody all the time no matter what. He's all bark and no bite." Her expression became hesitant. "Mostly bark, and just a little bite," she corrected herself.

Sagging against the building wall, Connie sighed. "I was worried he was in a bad mood because of what I did."

"Oh, he definitely is," Jenny assured her. "You ruined New Napkin Day. That's, like, his favorite day of the month."

Connie swallowed hard as Jenny skipped back to the pizza-themed car parked by the dumpster. "Another delivery run?" she asked, if only to change the subject.

"Special delivery," Jenny said with a wink. As she slid behind the wheel, she added, "Lunch is basically over now, so I'm gone. You should do the same as soon as you can. If you let him, Daddy will keep you here until you're older than Gunga."

The car backed out and pivoted out of the lot, zipping between rows of parked tourist vehicles. Connie gave the cheesy car a last wave before it disappeared up the hill.

A clatter of dishes from the kitchen broke through Connie's pleasant daze. She stopped long enough to check her phone and, for the tenth time, warn Steven from joining her to help work off her debt. If one Bejeweligan had been enough to ruin Kofi's day, she didn't want to see what it looked like if two of them managed to do worse, even by accident.

As she went back inside, Connie could see that Jenny had been right about the lunch rush. Only a few of the tables still had guests, and Kiki had already cleared the other tables of their dishes. Nanefua had resumed her spot at the sink to clean the sauce pots while Kofi packed the last of a stack of pizza boxes for delivery at the counter.

"Jenny!" Kofi barked. "Where is Jenny? We have deliveries!"

"She, um…" Connie tried to remember Jenny's advice, but her spine crumbled as Kofi's dark eyes swung upon her. "Sh-She said she had a special delivery to make."

His dagger eyes lingered on her, threatening to skewer her at the news. Finally, he whirled back around with a huff. "Special delivery? Bringing more free pizza to her lollygagging friends, you mean."

"She always buys the pizza with her tips," Nanefua said in a sing-song voice.

"And taking herself and the car away when we have deliveries!" Kofi retorted. "These pizzas are already late and cold as stone! She is going to ruin me!"

Kiki swooped behind the counter and took up the stack of piping hot boxes. Before Kofi could react, she plucked the tickets out of his hand and said, "I'll take them, Daddy!" Then she turned to leave before he could muster a new complaint, pausing only long enough to silently mouth a single word to Connie: "RUN."

As Kiki slipped out the back door, Connie began formulating some excuse for herself too. But the sudden lack of argument seemed to make Kofi even angrier. He took his frustrations out on a ball of pizza dough, kneading it against the counter so hard that the entire cabinet underneath it shook with the force of his hands.

Finished with the dishes, Nanefua stepped down from her stool to find a towel. As she dried her hands, she pointedly cleared her throat.

Kofi flinched, pausing his dough in mid-pummel. Then he straightened and bellowed, "Intern! Come here!"

Connie was at his side before he finished. "Did you need me to clean something else?" she said, hoping she didn't sound as tired as she felt.

He scoffed and gestured to the counter. "Any lemur with a broom can clean. You will learn something useful." Then he left for the walk-in refrigerator, disappearing into it without further instruction.

Something bumped Connie on the back of her calves, and she looked back to find Nanefua pushing the sink footstool up behind her. Obediently she stepped up and stood at the counter. A flood of questions filled her, but she held back, waiting in attentive silence.

Kofi returned from the walk-in with two finished lumps of dough, each one a little bigger than his fist. He slapped the counter with one of the balls in front of Connie, and then did the same with the other in front of him. "Flatten that into a circle as big as a plate," he instructed her, and began doing as he said with his own dough.

Connie tried to copy his motions, finding it much more difficult to keep the dough evenly spread than Kofi made the process look. When hers was more or less like his, he showed her how to stretch the dough over her fists, working it with her knuckles until it doubled in size. She was a little disappointed that he wasn't spinning the dough in the air like she'd always seen TV chefs doing, but given how much of a mess she had made with his napkins, she could understand.

The simple task kept her spellbound as she tried to keep her dough round. So she jumped with a start as Kofi thumped a pot of sauce on the counter behind her dough. "Two ladles," he commanded, handing her the instrument in question and pointing to her dough. "Too little, and the pizza is tough. Too much, and the pizza is soup." He had already sauced his dough and covered it in cheese from a container on the counter. His hands worked a cutting board with a knife, carving a pepperoni stick into paper-thin slices while he kept his eyes on Connie's pizza.

Connie kept her shoulders tensed, waiting for him to scold her or push her aside to do the job himself. But Kofi remained unexpectedly silent as she layered her pizza with sauce and then perhaps a little too much cheese. By the time she finished, he had moved on to slicing mushrooms.

"Your pizza looks a lot better than mine," she joked, rising a tiny smile at him as she gestured to her somewhat oblong creation.

He harrumphed, looking down his nose at the praise. But for the first time all day, his voice lost its perpetual edge. "I would be out of business if I could not make a better pizza," he said.

"Where did you learn?" asked Connie. "Did you go to a culinary school?"

His knife stopped mid-mushroom, and Kofi eyed her suspiciously. Then he harrumphed again. "Children are too squirmy to sit through such a long story," he declared.

Connie lifted her own nose, copying his imperious tone. "Then it's a good thing I'm not a child. And I like long stories."

Nanefua cackled behind them as Kofi eyed Connie in disbelief. But he recovered quickly, pushing the sliced ingredients at her. "Spread evenly. Don't overlap." He produced a tin of olives and began to spread them over his own pizza. His hands moved quickly, and never twice over the same spot, dotting the pie evenly with the topping. "When I was the girls' age, I moved to Accra. I lived in a studio apartment, fighting with rats for floor space and leaving crumbs on my chest at night so the roaches would crawl over me for a blanket."

"Ew!" Connie exclaimed, grinning.

Nanefua snorted. "He saw a roach once," she said.

"It was more than once!" squalled Kofi. Then, reverently, he continued, "By day I worked as a courier, making deliveries on a bicycle I built myself. In the evenings I cleaned office buildings, scrubbing my fingers to the bone. And when I came home in the dark, I would study until dawn, reading by the light of the neon sign outside my window."

Connie's heart swelled. She could remember many a night when she had hid her reading light under the blankets to read through to dawn. "You were studying to become a pizza chef?" she asked.

Kofi took her pizza from her before she could load too many toppings onto it. Using a long wooden peel, he loaded his and her pizzas into the stacked ovens on the back wall. "A chef? No!" he said, laughing. "I was going to be a doctor!"

"Oh." Connie blinked, and then looked around the restaurant in lieu of asking the obvious question.

"But," continued Kofi, "I did live above a pizzeria. The owner would give me leftovers if I helped him clean, since I came home at the time when he closed. We used to complain about our terrible landlord together."

"When Kofi did a very good job, the owner used to slip money into the pizza boxes he gave Kofi," Nanefua said, sighing fondly. "Such a kind man, taking care of such a sour child."

"I was a sweet treasure of a boy," Kofi retorted. He drew a flat piece of cardboard from under the counter and folded it into a pizza box too fast for Connie to follow his movements. "If anything ever made me cynical, it was my upbringing."

Nanefua leaned close to Connie and said, sotto voce, "Kofi is the only child ever to be born with a lemon in his mouth. And he scolded the doctor who took it from him."

"As I was saying," Kofi said pointedly to his giggling audience. Once they had settled, he continued, "I worked all day and studied all night. It was grueling, but I knew what I had to do to achieve my dream. I would attend the University of Ghana, become a doctor, open my own practice, and become a rich and famous healer."

Connie hung on tiptoe as he trailed off, his attention drifting to the countertop. As he polished the work surface with a kitchen rag, Connie exploded, "And then what?"

"Then what? Then I failed!" Kofi said, laughing again.

"…that's it?" Connie said, incredulous. "The way you built it up, I thought something huge happened, like a secret cabal of evil doctors sabotaged you, or your great-great-uncle died and willed you his secret pizza recipe."

"I was working two jobs and studying without sleep," Kofi scoffed. "My WASSCE scores were terrible, nowhere near what I needed to apply. And it would take me over a year to save up enough money to take the tests again. As soon as I saw my exam results, I wandered the city in a daze. It seemed like my entire future had collapsed in front of me."

Connie felt her stomach churn in sympathy. The thought of failing any test filled her with dread. Failing a test that would decide her future seemed too horrible to contemplate. "But you ended up okay, right?" she said.

"I don't remember much after that. I must have walked the city all day, because the next thing I remember is standing in front of the pizzeria in the dark. The owner saw me and brought me inside. He fed me and listened to me, even though I must have been talking nonsense by that time."

With no timer to tell him, Kofi opened the ovens and drew each pizza out with his peel, putting the one Connie had made into the box he'd prepared. Then he produced a pizza cutter, a broad blade as long as Connie's arm that curved out from the handles at either end.

"When I ate until I could burst, he sent me on my way with another whole box of pizza. I should have gone home. But instead, I stood outside and stared at that neon sign, his sign, that had let me study all those months. His restaurant had given me food, money, and even light to read by. It had done more for me than anyone I knew."

Nanefua cleared her throat loudly. Kofi answered with a withering look.

"The next morning I came back to the shop. As soon as I set foot on that dirty tile, I felt at balance. So I marched into the kitchen and demanded that the owner give me a job."

"Demanded?" Connie echoed in amazement.

"…politely requested," Kofi admitted.

"Begged," Nanefua said. "And when he got it, he called me in tears, he was so grateful." She ignored Kofi's indignant glare to pat her son on the arm.

Kofi cut the boxed pizza into eighths with deadly precision. Then he fiddled with the slices' placement, lifting one of them to adjust it. "I worked for him for years, learning everything he could teach me. And when he retired, I moved to America, bringing with me my mother and a new dream: to open my own restaurant and be to others what this man was to me."

"But how did you know this dream would work out?" Connie said.

"I didn't. But I had balance in where I was and a clear view of where I would go. Those are the two best assets a person must have for any endeavor. When I studied to be a doctor, I lacked the balance to do it wisely. My children are little better: Jenny dreams of music, but fritters away her time; Kiki works hard for college, but has no notion of what she will do once she gets there. Vision without balance, and balance without vision."

"They are both young. They have plenty of time," Nanefua scolded him.

"Balance 'and' vision," Kofi insisted, folding the pizza box closed. "Good advice for dishwashers and joggers too." Then he offered the box to Connie.

Connie blinked, taking the box on reflex. Only then did her tired brain connect the pizza's toppings with who it was meant for. "For me? How did you know my favorite?"

"I notice Steven ordering that pie on days when I see you being dropped off at the boardwalk," Kofi said. "Now, leave. All of the health code violations you probably made just being here will cost me more than those napkins you destroyed with your blundering."

Her stomach fluttered, and she grinned. "Thank you," she said earnestly.

On her way out the door, she heard Kofi bellowing so loudly that it made everyone in the dining area jump. "But if you ever blow up my belongings again, I will make you wash dishes until your hands are worn down into stumps! And worse, I will call your parents!"

Connie grinned all the way out of the restaurant and down the hill toward the beach house. The smell of her favorite pizza, and the fact that she hadn't eaten yet that day, put a skip in her step.

But when she reached the sand, she stumbled, her stomach tugging her along faster than her tired legs could manage. A bad step took her onto her knees, and she almost lost her pizza. Worriedly, she cracked open the pizza box to make sure everything inside had survived.

The pie inside was lumpy, and its toppings uneven, just the way she had made it. And tucked underneath one of the slices was a little stack of green bills.

Chapter Text

"Are you sure you don't want to come?" Steven asked again.

Connie shook her head and smiled up at Steven and the Gems, who stood gathered on the warp pad in front of the temple door. "I do want to come, Steven. But until I have a weapon that's tough enough to protect me, I'll just be a liability out there."

The morning sunlight streaming through the windows painted Steven's worry in hues of red and gold. "I went on missions with the Gems all the time before I got my shield," he insisted, "and I wasn't a liability. Right, guys?"

Amethyst grimaced. Pearl squirmed. Garnet became suddenly fascinated with the joists in the ceiling.

"Huh. Yeah, okay," Steven conceded. "We're gonna leave that for now and maybe unpack it sometime in the future. But if you're staying, then I should—"

"You," Connie said, stopping him before he could dismount the warp pad, "should go on patrol. Pyrite and her goons are still out there. The Gems need you." Her smile widened with reassurance.

He worried his bottom lip in his teeth. "If you're sure…" drawled Steven.

"Tell you what," Connie told him, beaming. "If I change my mind, I'll just warp out to catch up with you guys."

"But you can't—oh." Steven smiled briefly before his frown took him back. "Okay. But before we go—"

"Amethyst?" Connie said through her widest grin.

"On it!" The stocky Quartz grabbed Steven by the shoulders and lifted him bodily over her head. "Have fun being queen of the castle. Don't do anything I wouldn't do," Amethyst said as she made Steven her luggage.

"Don't do most of the things Amethyst would do either," Garnet added.

"There's-fresh-iced-tea-in-the-fridge-okay-bye!" Steven blurted as the warp tunnel swallowed them out of the world.

As soon as the last light faded from the warp pad, Connie sagged in relief. She rubbed her aching cheeks as she staggered, blank-faced, back into the living room. With a bitter snort, she realized that the best thing about being left behind was the fact that she wouldn't have to put on a brave face about it for anyone.

But then, she wasn't completely alone in the house. A mountain of pink fur napped in the middle of the floor where the morning sunbeam crawled slowly across the room. Connie made her way toward Lion, pausing briefly at the coffee table to collect the packet of origami paper she'd left there the night before.

"You have the right idea, Lion," she sighed to him, and collapsed into his flank to slide to the floor. Lion didn't seem to notice the new presence leaning against him as she let her head drop back into his fluffiness. "Just hang back, nap all day. A little tuna for lunch. Maybe I should just do that."

By the time she'd finished the thought aloud, she held a finished paper crane. Dozens of its kind now populated the house, perched on the counters and bookshelves, and even a couple dangling from the ceiling, where Amethyst had hung them with strings and tape. Birds don't belong on the ground, the Quartz had explained when she'd done it.

Her eyes crossed, and she focused on the paper crane's pointy beak as it dropped against the tip of her nose. She'd made this crane from a sheet of deep green paper. "What is this, human?" the bird said in an acerbic version of Connie's voice. "Loitering? Dawdling? Oh, no, this is much worse. You are wallowing."

She sighed again. "I guess I am," she admitted.

The bird rustled its paper wings with the help of her fingers. "No one possessed of a Jade gemstone, even a pustule of liquids such as yourself, should ever stoop to wallowing. Seize the day! Be worthy of that stone!" insisted the paper crane.

Connie squeezed her eyes shut. "I'm trying, bird," she mumbled.

The paper crane pecked her nose. "Bawk! Bawk!"

She set the bird aside. Her idle hands made three more to join its flock before she gathered enough resolve to leave her pink cushion. Lion grumbled at the departure of his noisy space heater, but the sunbeam quickly filled in for what she took with her.

"Okay," she said, forcing life into her body once more. "Be a Jade. Be a Crystal Gem. You can—ulp!"

Mid-affirmation, a sudden force yanked her by the collarbone to faceplant onto the floor. She groaned and rolled over, peering underneath herself, and once the stars had faded from her eyes she found the culprit: Jade's sailcloth had poured itself out of its gemstone, and the edge had fallen underfoot before it had finished coalescing, giving Connie her chin-first landing atop the billowy green nuisance.

The pain radiating from her chin became a plunger that tamped all of her anger and frustration into her half-hollow. She wiped her mouth into a sneer as she yanked the sailcloth out from under her. "You know what? I'm glad you're here," she told the cloth, her lips peeling away from her teeth. "You and I have work to do."

With the sailcloth in tow, Connie changed into her father's old Herculoids T-shirt and some running shorts. Then she took down an old shoebox from the bookshelf, one Steven had shown her to contain a wealth of treasures from his dad. Inside the box were dozens of cassette tapes inside plastic cases, each one labeled with a strip of masking tape and a title written lovingly in marker.

Her finger traced down the row of tapes and stopped on a box labeled Mega Montage Mix Vol. III. She plucked the tape from its box and stuffed it into the ancient boom box Steven kept next to his bed.

As the synth bassline of Offramp to Danger Town by Loggy Kennins filled the house, Connie tied the sailcloth around her neck, letting it drape over one shoulder. "Let's do this!" she declared, raising her fists high.

The boombox fell silent with one final clack as the mixtape reached its end. But Connie hardly noticed, too deafened by the long, agonized groan she poured into Lion's side as she slumped bodily into the slumbering cat.

Hours of work had given her zero improvement. If anything, she felt like she was going backwards. Her Gem jumps were even less impressive than her regular jumps thanks to her exhausted legs. Gem strength lasted only a few seconds at a time, proven by the dumbbells she'd tried to lift and the new divots in the wood floor where she'd been working with them. And despite her best efforts at shifting it, her shape remained its everyday boring human self, only sweatier.

Worst of all, though, were her wind powers. No matter how she pushed and pulled the air, Connie couldn't produce more than a medium gale for more than a second. Her winds wouldn't be enough to harass a kite, let alone stop a rampaging Gem warrior. The air grenades she made were as strong as ever, but she knew that squeezing the air into a medium explosion was the absolute least Jade could do at the height of her power. Compared to the hurricane blasts the Gem had done while trapped in her own stone, Connie's own efforts felt pitiful.

She rolled over, untangling herself from the only real sign of progress she had made in the last week. "What about you?" she demanded of the sailcloth. "Are you going to do anything for me? Can you make me fly? Block an axe? Can you do anything besides hold up a picnic?"

The sailcloth drooped, stubbornly unresponsive.

Connie bundled the cloth into her face and screamed, kicking her heels against the floor until she emptied herself. Then she collapsed back into the pink plush, panting, and wishing the tantrum had made her feel even a little better.

She felt stupid for having expected anything different. Why should one more morning of training suddenly fix all of the things that were wrong with her? At the end of the day, she would still be the same weak, unstable, unhelpful human, exactly who she had been at the start of the summer, and exactly who she would be tomorrow, and the next day. She had no control over these dangerous powers, and no way of protecting the people she cared about. She was even less than she used to be, now that she didn't have a sword.

As she rolled over, clutching herself in misery, her eyes fell onto the warp pad. The beautiful white crystal had always fascinated her, allowing the Gems to galivant across the world with just a handful of steps. If she wasn't so useless, she could have galivanted with them. If she could master Jade's gemstone, she could use it herself, returning to the farm, or to the strawberry battlefield, or to the Sky Arena.

Connie's misery hiccupped as she remembered the extra sabers Pearl kept up in the Arena. Her hand itched for a hilt, for the weight of a blade in her hand, if only to remind herself that she was good at something. Good for something.

Lion chuffed as she pushed to her feet again and strode to the pad, leaving the sailcloth to dissolve behind her. "Just warp to the Sky Arena," she told herself as she mounted the crystal platform. "You've been there a hundred times before. It's easy. You can do it."

Closing her eyes, she sculpted the entirety of the Arena in her mind. Her booking power summoned up every crevice, every crack and crumbling pillar, every empty seat and missing tile. She mashed the sum of it all into a single thought, which she pushed down through her feet, trying to shove it into the darkened crystal beneath her.

"Any Gem can do it," Connie said through gritted teeth. "Now warp."

Frustration crackled through her, breaking the seal on her half-hollow. Her own nasty feelings spilled out faster than she could stuff them back inside. A hard breath whistled through her teeth, and she dropped to her knees, clutching the stone at her throat as if that could stem the leak. Something tickled the back of her neck, and she realized that her hair was caught up in a breeze that circled the pad.

"Come on. Come on!" Connie snarled at herself. She tried to imagine the sludgy feelings dripping through her soles into the warp pad, willing it to get rid of her out of sheer disgust for her presence. But something else kept scattering her thoughts, pulling at her from the outside. "Work! Do something! Let me IN!" she bellowed.

A sound filled the room, chasing after the echo of Connie's shout. It wasn't the chime of the warp pad she had been hoping for, but instead a familiar grungle-whoosh. Her head turned at the sound, and her stomach dropped.

The temple door stood open. And beyond it lay a dark staircase bathed in a red light cast from some unseen depths.

Connie startled backwards from the door. The wind around her snapped, then died, settling her hair back over her shoulders as she stared into the darkened stairs leading downward into the temple. The stairs and the light both were familiar to her, though she had only seen them twice before. Unless this was some new chamber, she knew those stairs would lead her down into the Burning Room.

She started forward, but then hesitated. It felt strange enough to be left alone in the beach house. How wrong would it feel to go into the temple by herself? And besides that, she knew the temple held unknown dangers even to those who belonged there. Steven had been hunted by her bizarre, matrimonially-themed doppelganger in his own room. Whatever waited for Connie might not be so creepily whimsical if it decided to hunt her.

But the temple had opened its door for her. Its powers of creation might be somewhat monkey's-paw-ish, at least for Steven, but she knew the temple wasn't some hungry creature trying to lure her into its stomach. It had responded to her. That meant something. Didn't it?

She felt the round edges of Jade's gemstone, which her hand had unconsciously risen to clutch. Hesitation didn't befit a Jade, she decided. So, with her heartbeat pounding in her ears, Connie stepped from the warp pad and, with one last breath to steel herself, entered the temple.

The slap of her bare feet sounded like gunshots in the thrumming silence of the room. She lingered at the bottom step, summoning her courage before she descended to the floor of the Burning Room.

It was a different experience altogether, standing alone beneath the sea of bubbles that floated at the ceiling. She felt small beneath the sheer number of stones the Gems had collected, as though the entirety of a war she'd only known through stories was hanging over her head, just one wrong move away from popping and raining down on them to start anew.

As she wandered with her heads in the bubbled clouds, her toe thumped against something hard. She frowned down at the lumpy mass of slag she and Steven had transported from his mother's Armory. The Slag Mite's gemstone still lay trapped within, its mirror surface perfect amidst the muddy blend of metals around it.

Crouching, Connie traced the outline of a blue crossguard in the mass. The remnants of Tempest Rain made her wistful for that beautiful period of five seconds when she had once again been a useful member of the team. If only the Slag Mite hadn't eaten the sword, she might have been with the others on patrol at that very moment instead of being a magical trespasser.

Something irresistible pulled her gaze overhead. She didn't want to look. She knew no good would come from looking. But still, her eyes tilted until she looked up at the only uncorrupted gemstone being held in that room.

"Bismuth," she said, rising to glare at the pink bubble and the pyramidal stone inside of it.

Pyrite took you apart without even trying, Connie heard from somewhere overhead, in a voice that sounded very much like a paper bird she'd traded words with earlier. She beat you at the strawberry battlefield even worse than she did at Ascension.

Connie's arms crossed against an imaginary chill in the lava-lit room. "You're lucky you never met me," she told the gemstone darkly. "I don't like people who try to kill my best friend. Except Lapis, but she's a special case. And the jury's still out on Peridot. But I definitely didn't like Jasper, and if you ever tried that again, I'd give you what we gave her."

She took you apart like you were nothing. Because you are nothing.

Her finger tapped nervously at her elbow, and she hugged herself even tighter. The weight of her glare made her face ache until she couldn't hold it anymore. "Then I'd tell you I was sorry," Connie continued. "I'm sorry Rose Quartz locked you away. I'm sorry you were trapped in Lion. You were angry, and dangerous, but that didn't make what she did right. And I'm sorry you're locked up now. Nobody deserves to be trapped like that, without a body."

The gemstone at her neck felt heavy.

You're nothing without Rose's sword. You're barely anything with it."

"And then," Connie murmured, "I'd tell you what a good job you did, making Rose's sword. How much it meant to me. And that I'm sorry I lost it."

Rubbing her arms, Connie gave the bubble one last look. Then she shook her head, feeling silly for talking to herself. She didn't belong in the Burning Room. Resolving herself to leave, she steadied herself for the climb upstairs with a long, deep sigh.

The breath from her sigh rushed out of her with the force of a cannon shot, staggering her and yanking her hair up over her face. As she clawed the long tresses out of her eyes, she watched in horror as her hurricane sigh swept up through the room, visible most by the ripple it sent through the sea of bubbles overhead. Perfect spheres whorled together, their four colors knocking against one another, each collision ringing out like a glass chime to create a terrifying discordant crescendo that deafened the room.

Connie's heart stopped, waiting for a wave of bubbles to pop and send a nightmare hail falling upon her. But the bubbles all held, falling to silence as they all stilled.

All of them, save one. Her errant breath had caught the pink bubble above her in its wake, spinning it into a loopy path high above the floor. Like a leaf on the wind, Bismuth's gemstone flitted with alarming speed and no clear direction, content to ride the current to its end.

Jolting in horror, Connie chased after the bubble, trying to catch it, or to guess its next direction, and failing at both. "Oh, no! No, no, no, no, no!" she cried.

The bilious sigh, not content to merely persist long after Connie had lost her breath, picked up speed. The bubble caught in its grasp became a pink blur. Its long, comical loops carried it toward the far wall of the room, and to rough-hewn stone waiting to catch it. Heedless of how beautifully fragile it was, the bubble looped closer to its end, where it would surely pop.

"No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!" Connie babbled. Her fingertips craned at the bubble, as though she could reach halfway across the room to stop it. The imperiled bubble slipped further and further away with every slap of her bare feet on the stone. With nothing left to lose, and no coherent sense to stop her, Connie jumped.

Her stomach lurched as the world around her became a blur, the colors of the room smearing together. She kept her eyes fixed on the pink bubble, reaching for it with every inch she could muster, determined to do everything she could to prevent a catastrophe. When she felt her hands close around the bubble's sides, she could hardly believe it. But there was no time to celebrate with the stone wall still hurtling at them. So she flipped her body in midair, holding the bubble straight out in front of her as her back slammed into the wall.

She collapsed to the floor with the bubble held aloft. Every other part of her puddled onto the warm stone, but the bubble remained untouched, save for her tender grasp.

Groaning, Connie shambled onto her knees, using her elbows to lift herself. Her eyes watered in relief as she examined the pristine bubble and its contents. Then she looked past the bubble to the long expanse of floor, all the way to where she knew she had been standing on the far side of the lava pool when she'd jumped. In one bound, she'd crossed more than thirty feet of floor.

She had done it. She'd Gem-jumped! And she'd saved the bubble!

Connie laughed, shaking with post-adrenaline jitters. Then she bowed her head and sighed in relief.

Like the last sigh, her tiny breath emerged in an explosive gale. The wind tore the bubble from her hands and slammed it into the floor, where it popped with a single, resounding poip! Now freed, Bismuth's gemstone clattered across the room, falling to rest at the base of the lava pool. The stone gave a little shake, and then lifted off the stone, floating up as its surface began to glimmer

"…oh, no," Connie breathed, parting her curtain of hair to watch the gemstone rise.

Chapter Text

As the stepped pyramid gemstone rose into the air, Connie froze. She knew she needed to run. A killer Gem who'd tried to murder her best friend was about to return with all of her faculties intact and a fresh memory of how she'd been poofed.

And yet, Connie couldn't look away. Of all the marvelous things she had seen, Connie had never watched a Gem put herself back together. The closest she had been to such a sight had been in Stevonnie's fight with Jasper, when Amethyst had re-formed herself. But being part of someone else while battling a rampaging Quartz hadn't allowed Connie much time to appreciate the process. Now, with her legs unresponsive, she found plenty of time for the breathtaking sight.

Pure light burbled from the stone, flowing like water along an invisible map of channels and pathways until a body took shape. Thick limbs sprouted from a tall, stout frame that belied power and strength worthy of the Gem's reputation. As the flow of light ebbed, its glow subsided. Slate gray skin gleamed freshly beneath the lines of a black tunic, which framed the gemstone. Rough brown leggings materialized, and then were draped behind a long square of fabric that formed into an apron colored in warm shades of red. A wave of dreadlocks grew from the scalp and flashed into a rainbow variety of colors.

As the body settled on its final shape, the Crystal Gems' iconic star manifested itself at either of the Gem's arms, spanning her shoulders with five sharp points.

Beneath her terror, Connie felt awed by the beauty of watching a creature make itself. The process felt unearthly, powerful, but somehow profoundly vulnerable. It was like watching an artist paint their own portrait on a canvas of their own body, willing themselves into existence through pure creativity.

Then the newly-formed Gem's eyes opened, and Connie remembered that she should have been running.

Now reconstituted, Bismuth touched down on the floor, staggering under the sudden reacquisition of mass. She grabbed the edge of the lava pool to steady herself, not seeming to mind when her fingers dipped into the molten rock.

"What? Where…?" the Gem wheezed. Her gaze fell onto Connie. "Who are you?"

Connie lifted her hands in a calming gesture. "Please don't freak out," she begged. She could have been talking to herself as much as to Bismuth.

Bismuth frowned. "Why would I…?" she started to ask as her gaze wandered the room. When she looked up, her eyes widened, and she gasped. "What in the Empty Sky is this?" she cried, and collapsed backwards onto the floor to cower from the ceiling.

The Gem's growing terror set off warning bells in Connie's head. She fought to keep her own voice calm and even as she said, "You're okay. You're inside the Gems' temple. This is where they keep the corruptions they capture."

Her soothing tone had the opposite effect on Bismuth. The big Gem's face darkened like a summer storm on the horizon as it rounded back upon Connie. "Corruptions?" she echoed, and the word rolled like thunder. "You mean like me? Is this where Rose stuck all of the other Gems who didn't fall in line?"

Now it was Connie's turn to be shocked. What on Earth did Bismuth mean by that? "No! No, that's not what—"

But Bismuth didn't hear Connie, or she didn't care. Still collapsed on the ground, the Gem's gaze sprang from one bubble to the next as she searched the cloud above them. "Tiger's Eye? Little Larimar? Beryl! Serpentine!" As she craned her head upward, her hand caught on the lump metal that held the poofed Slag Mite. She grabbed up the metal like it weight nothing and stared into the mirrored stone wrapped in its middle. "Hematite? No! She wouldn't hurt a pebble! What did they do to her?"

As Connie watched, Bismuth began to dig at the metal, trying to wedge the stone out of the melted slag. Was the renegade Gem confused from her un-bubbling? Or did she think she could wreak vengeance on Steven and the Gems with pack of wild corruptions? "Wait, wait, wait!" Connie cried, raising a hand.

Bismuth ignored her. Rising back to her feet, she plunged her arm up to the elbow into the lava pool and held it there, submerged. Little splashes jumped from the edge of the pool and sizzled into permanent lumps on the floor. After a few seconds, Bismuth drew out of the lava, admiring the shimmering red heat that suffused her arm.

Connie knew she had to stop the Gem, but as soon as she took a step, she could feel the intense heat rolling off of Bismuth's hand. Whatever powers the Burning Room had to shut down convection didn't work beyond the edge of the lava pool. One touch from that glowing hand could instantly barbecue Connie, and she couldn't gust away Bismuth's hand like she could Flint's fire blasts. "Bismuth, you can't let her out!" Connie shouted, shielding her face from the heat with her hands.

The Gem's bright grasp plunged through the slag. Her heat and strength pushed aside the mix of alloys as though it were butter. "Hang on, Shiny. I'll have you out of there in no time, and then we can get the others out of this messed-up place," she said to the stone.

"Are you crazy? Don't!" Connie cried, too late. The silvery gemstone bounced free onto the floor.

Whirling, Bismuth fixed Connie with a hard look. It wasn't a glare, but only by dint of the Gem's confusion. "Listen, little guy. I don't know how you ended up here, but it's not safe for humans. We're not going to hurt you, but you need to stay out of our way until Hematite and I…"

The big Gem trailed off as she and Connie watched the freed gemstone rising. For an instant, something with two arms and two legs emerged from the stone in a lightning flash. But the white light lost its shape before it even started, and the luminescence piled itself beneath the stone instead, forming an ovoid shape. Long, spidery appendages unfurled from the ovoid's sides and slammed into the floor, lifting body and gemstone to its full, fearsome stature.

Without her stalactite exoskeleton, the corrupted Hematite looked strangely cute. Connie couldn't help but picture it as the unlikely offspring of a daddy long legs, a mirror, and a giant bejeweled watermelon. As she rose up, her rotund little body wobbled, not unlike a newborn deer trying to walk for the first time. In a nicer world, Connie thought she could have found the corruption a home in the world's most exotic petting zoo.

But that cuteness lasted only as long as it took for the corruption to find her footing. Sensing the other two in the room, she reared back, skittering, her feet clacking loudly against the stone. The gemstone on top of her body rose up on a thick pink tendril to whip at the space between them, and the bottom of her body irised open into a hideous shriek.

"Hematite?" whispered Bismuth. A stricken look crossed the Gem's face, an expression so heartbroken that it made Connie's chest hurt to look at it. But then she saw Bismuth's hands reflexively shift into mallets the size of oil drums, and she quickly remembered that there were two deadly Gems loose in the room with her, not just one.

The corrupted Hematite warbled at them, giving them a clear look at the glowing heat in its maw. Then it skittered toward a far corner of the room. Beyond the light of the pool, the corruption seemed to squeeze itself around a corner that wasn't there. The clatter of its feet vanished into some unseen distance.

Connie gaped at the wall where the corruption had disappeared. Then she shook herself out of her surprise, worried that she had missed Bismuth making her move. One missed second could mean the Gem's escape, or worse. Not that Connie would be able to stop anything the Gem did.

But to Connie's utter shock, Bismuth had not run. The huge smith had fallen to her knees, her face a haunted void, her eyes staring into the distance where the corruption had disappeared. "Wh-What happened to her?" Bismuth whispered.

Connie examined the Gem's stricken expression from a safe distance. Nothing in the Gem's reactions, in the choices Bismuth had made since re-forming, made any kind of sense unless…

"They didn't tell you," Connie realized aloud.

"They told me everybody was gone. That Homeworld wiped them out. But I never… I couldn't imagine…" Trembling, Bismuth rose to her feet. Her gaze swept overhead, and her eyes grew even more sunken. "There's too many bubbles here. Rose was persuasive, but even she couldn't have recruited this many Gems to the cause."

As understanding emerged across Bismuth's face, Connie nodded and said, "They're all here. Homeworld and Crystal Gems. The Diamonds did this to every Gem still on the planet as retaliation for what Rose did…to Pink Diamond."

Hearing the name staggered Bismuth, and she collapsed back against the lava pool. "Rose. She got Pink. And the Diamonds…"

Her ragged puffing devolved into a chuckle, and then a ragged laugh, until it tumbled down into a deep, full-throated guffaw. Bismuth doubled over with laughter, burying her face in her hands as her whole body shook.

"Rose bubbled me for the idea. And then she stole the idea anyway! And it worked! It ended the war!" Bismuth crowed into her hands.

Connie's skin tried to crawl inside of her at the sound of the Gem's hollow laughter. "Bismuth?" she said.

Tears streamed down Bismuth's cheeks. "No wonder they didn't tell me!" she laughed, and threaded her fingers through her rainbow dreadlocks to clutch at her scalp. "They must have known how mad I'd be that I didn't get credit for the thinking of it!"

Each laugh became longer and rougher, until they finally choked the Gem into silence. But her shoulders kept shaking, and the tears didn't stop.

Connie wavered, completely lost for what to do. She had steeled herself for an unwinnable battle when Bismuth's bubble had popped. Somehow, this fallout seemed just as bad as the gruesome squishing she'd imagined.

Bismuth recovered quickly, gasping and wiping at her face. The Gem swallowed the last of her wheezing and rose. "Okay. Enough of that. You need to get out of here, little guy. I'm going to find Hematite and…" She trailed off uncertainly, her hands clenching into fists.

"No!" Connie blurted. As Bismuth fixed her with a look of surprise, Connie felt her stomach plummet. "I mean, I don't want to leave you here alone. And there'll be real trouble if I don't make sure the Sla—I mean, Hematite gets back in a bubble."

Bismuth's searching gaze lingered on her. A cold sweat beaded at Connie's hairline, and she smiled uneasily. After what felt like an eon, Bismuth shrugged and said, "Okay. But stay behind me. That meat you're packing can't take as much punishment as good old photomatter can." And she thumped her midsection.

Smiling with a confidence she didn't feel, Connie fell in behind the huge Gem, forcing herself not to dawdle too far outside of the Gem's reach lest it seem suspicious. Her mind whirled, trying to come up with some way of dealing with the renegade smith on her own, but it seemed impossible. The best she could do at that moment was to keep Bismuth in sight and wait for circumstances to change.

Together they rounded to the back of the Burning Room where the corruption had disappeared. To her confusion, Connie found herself walking around a corner that wasn't visible from the other side of the room. Walking around it felt to Connie like circling a mirror that didn't exist; one moment, it wasn't there, and the next moment, it was. The disparity made her insides twist as she tilted herself from side to side, trying to understand where the corner existed.

A soft chuckle behind her made Connie jump, and she glanced back to see Bismuth watching her. "Is this your first time inside a reactive tessellated space?" the big Gem said, smirking.

"Not exactly," Connie admitted. She forced herself to focus on Bismuth as the Gem led the way around the not-corner. Watching the smith's broad shoulders instead of architecture that defied logic made her less dizzy. "I'm just used to rooms with dimensions you can see."

The not-corner led them into a small, dark corridor made of rough walls that framed a smooth, straight floor. At the distant end of the corridor lay some bright exit. The echo of cascading waters murmured in the tunnel, barely audible.

"I've built a few of these in my day," Bismuth remarked, letting her hand drift across the stone as they started down the corridor. "The hard part is squeezing all those extra dimensions into the inside. This one feels like it has a lot of room to spare."

Connie made a non-committal noise as she studied the big Gem's frame. Before Connie had met Pyrite, she never thought she'd see a Gem more durable than Jasper. But the smith would even give Shard's golden champion a run for her money. Bismuth's body wasn't built for speed, grace, or finesse, but she had all the tells of being an absolute bulldozer in a fight. Without Rose's sword to pierce Bismuth's form, Connie would have to inflict enough punishment to poof Bismuth the hard way, and she knew her human hands weren't up to the task.

"So, what's your story?" Bismuth tossed over her shoulder.

"Buh?" Connie blurted, jerking out of her tactical daydream.

"The last time I wasn't a floating decoration, we didn't have any humans lurking around our base. How did you end up down here, little guy?" asked Bismuth.

"I-I wasn't lurking. And I'm a girl, not a guy," Connie stammered in retort.

"Yeah? Good for you!" It was impossible to discern any sarcasm in Bismuth's reply. Worse, the smith kept her curious glance aimed backwards, expecting more from Connie as an answer.

"I'm, uh, a friend of the Gems. Sometimes I help them with, uh, stuff, and they show me magical things," said Connie. "I ended up inside the temple, but I'm not exactly supposed to be here by myself."

"Mmm-hmm," Bismuth grunted. "And while you were down there, looking for 'magical' things, my bubble…?"

Connie winced. "There may have been some accidents," she admitted. That much alone didn't need to be a lie, but the words still tasted like ash in Connie's mouth.

Bismuth laughed. "I bet," she said. Then her face smoothed, and her voice softened. "Then do you know who I am?"

Fighting every muscle in her face to keep from wincing, Connie said, "I've heard them say your name."

"Mmn," Bismuth grunted. "Well, maybe once we take care of Hematite we can get you caught up. For now, let's just focus on what's in…front of us…" Her words trailed off as they reached the far mouth of the corridor.

Connie squeezed around the big smith and lost her breath to the very same sight. They stood at the cusp of a grand chamber, the scope of which made Connie feel infinitesimal. The chamber walls shifted around them, a blackness dotted with constellations and stellar phenomena, a living tapestry woven from an alien night sky. The floor before them was a ring of unidentifiable metal segmented with enormous mirrored circles, and within the ring flowed a pool of pale, luminous water. And above, suspended by some unseen power, were a series of stepped platforms, each one higher and larger than the one beneath it. That same luminous water flowed over the rim of each platform into the pool below to create a small concert of cascading waterfalls across the breadth of the room.

"It's beautiful," Connie heard herself whisper. The words came unbidden, the only possible reaction to seeing the chamber.

"It's Pearl's room," Bismuth murmured. At Connie's questioning look, Bismuth smiled wanly and said, "Only Pearl could make something like this." Her eyes shimmered as she gazed in clear adoration at the room's expanse.

The water at the heart of the pool suddenly thrashed. Connie saw mirrored legs clawing at the water before disappearing under, caught within a current that whorled down at the pool's center into some unknown depths. The creature's last shriek dwindled and vanished underneath the down of the rushing water.

"Looks like we're going down," Bismuth said. She strode purposefully to the edge of the water.

Connie balked at the water's edge as she watched Bismuth wade into its shallows. Illuminated waters rose up past the smith's knees as she forded ahead. "We don't know where that goes," Connie insisted, "or if the corr—if Hematite will be waiting for us at the bottom."

"You can stay if you want," Bismuth called, wading waist-deep to the edge of the whirlpool and the drop at its center. "But it's like Biggs used to tell me: nobody shines forever." Then she leapt into the heart of the whirlpool, letting the current sweep her down and away. "So shine while you can!" her dwindling voice echoed.

The Gem's sheer exuberance staggered Connie. Sneaking into Pearl's room, seeing its beauty after trying to imagine it for so long, as already enough to root Connie to the spot with wonder and guilt. But to see Bismuth rebound after being in tears only moments ago, and in bubbled stasis from a near-lethal battle moments before that… It floored Connie. Bismuth's physical resilience was obvious to anyone who saw her, but Connie wondered if the toughest thing about Bismuth might run deeper than the Gem's adamantine skin.

Then Connie realized that Bismuth had run off alone in the temple, the one thing Connie definitely wanted to prevent. Instantly, Connie's feet came unglued, and she clambered over the edge and into the water. Her clothes sagged in the luminous pool, dragging her forward with the current until she spun into the edge of the whirlpool. Thrashing to keep her head above water, Connie felt herself dragged into the heart of the pool, where a black depth reached up to swallow her into freefall.

Stomach lurching, limbs tumbling, Connie screamed the long way down the pale waterfall. Her body slapped through a floor of a crystal pool and plunged her into bubbly confusion. She thrashed, pushing off of a cloudy bottom, and then surfaced with a gasp, her lungs sucking greedily at the air.

Coughing, she crawled out of the crystal pool, fishing the stringy wet hair out of her eyes. She found Bismuth by touch more than by sight, her flailing hands bouncing off of Bismuth's thick arm. When Connie could see again, she looked up, and felt her blood run cold at the horror in Bismuth's eyes.

"Oh, my stars," croaked Bismuth, "we're too late. Look at all of this! Was this some kind of human sanctuary? Or a shelter? How did she do so much damage in just a few seconds?"

Connie surveyed the disaster into which they had fallen. The room was a dirt floor with large crystalline growths sprouting like monoliths from its depths. Gray walls framed the crystal garden and its pool in a quiet, high-ceilinged cavern. And every single remaining inch of the space belonged to a menagerie of junk the likes of which Connie had never imagined. There were piles as tall as the crystal monoliths, piles as tall as the ceiling, piles stacked on piles that teetered under a precarious, perpetual threat of collapse.

She saw furniture, and boxes, and crates, and electronics that were old enough to have vacuum tubes inside of them. She saw pieces of cars, the front half of a boat, and the back half of a different boat. There were idols, knickknacks, relics, stacked and piled into veritable walls, and mortared into place with pure garbage: wrappers, packages, papers, rotting peels, and plain old dirt. All of it towered above Connie in a parody of organization that would have made her mother break down into hysterics merely to look upon it.

"I think this is Amethyst's room," Connie said, her gaze wandering between the piles. "And I think it's supposed to look like this."

"Really?" Blinking, Bismuth climbed off her knees and took stock of the room again. "Wow. That Quartz is a little twisted, isn't she?"

An piercing skee-runch noise made Connie balk. She whirled around and spotted their quarry at the base of one of the mounds, working her under-mouth at some angular metal shape buried there. Connie took an extra second to recognize the shape of the corruption's snack to be some old, angular car, the weird kind that had been a time machine in one of the old movies her father had shown her once. Hematite tore one of the car's gullwing doors off and crumpled it into her maw, stuffing it up her gullet with her spidery forelegs.

"Hey!" Bismuth shouted, startling the corruption out of her meal. With arms spread low, Bismuth approached, speaking in a soft voice as she drew closer. "Come on, Shiny. You know me. You're better than whatever those Upper Crusts did to you. You're worth ten Diamonds. You can beat this!"

As the smith drew closer, Connie held her breath in silent hope. But then she saw a red glow irising open as the corruption tilted backwards. "Look out!" Connie cried, too late again.

Hematite coughed a ball of slag, and the molten alloys struck Bismuth squarely in the face, wrapping into a mask that swallowed her thick features. Bismuth staggered backwards and clawed at the edge of the mask to no avail. Her stumbling would have crashed through another stack if Connie hadn't caught the smith with a hand and pushed with all her might to warn Bismuth to stop.

As the mask cooled, Bismuth finally yanked it free. Her sooty features pulled into a grimace as she examined the lumpy shape of her features cast into the metal. "Talk about a situation getting ugly," she grunted.

A wet noise made them both look up from the crude mask in time to see another glowing slag ball arcing toward them. Bismuth shoved Connie to the ground, flattening her with a hand and using her body as a shield from the spatter of red fleck as the ball punched through a wooden crate behind them labeled, Days Of Our Lives (Betamax). Strange black cassettes spilled out from the box, which began to splinter and crumple under the weight of the garbage above it. With deadly inevitability, the pile tilted down upon Connie and Bismuth, its structure collapsing with the loss of its load-bearing television show.

Before Connie could finish registering the tumbling garbage that would crush her, she felt her world thrown sideways. Bismuth had shifted her arm into a long scoop and, in one surprisingly gentle motion, had flung Connie across the room and out from under the edge of the collapsing pile.

Connie's scream disappeared under the crash and clatter of a thousand different curious spilling across the floor. She tumbled through the air and hit another pile on the far side of the room, bouncing off the cushions of a sofa looked Victorian and smelled like old tuna. By the time she rolled up off the floor, the collapsing pile had settled again, and Bismuth was its new base.

"Get out of here!" Bismuth wheezed. The Gem's whole body was pinned, with only her head protruding from the flotsam's edge. A few pieces rattled as she tried to burst free, but nothing above her budged.

The metallic hammering of feet filled the room. Hematite charged straight for Bismuth, trailing her long bejeweled tongue behind her. Red fury underlit the corruption as she roared.

Connie froze in mid-heartbeat. Without a sword, she would never stand a chance of poofing Bismuth and returning her to the Burning Room. But Hematite seemed eager to do the job for her. And Connie liked her odds of keeping Hematite in the temple until the Gems came back. Leaving Bismuth to the corruption's mercies made the most sense.

So even Connie didn't fully understand her own decision when she thrust her fists at the corruption.

The air in front of Hematite rippled and exploded. With a shout, Connie blasted the corruption again and again, squeezing air grenades as fast as she could with the power of her half-hollow. The rushing air couldn't do any real damage to Hematite's mirrored hide, but the impacts chased her back, breaking her charge.

Bismuth's eyes widened at the violent winds. "How are you doing that?" she exclaimed.

"Brace yourself!" Connie barked at the smith, and then turned her clenching hands at the pile. Air whistled between the gaps of the collapsed garbage as a new air grenade gathered deep beneath the surface, as deep as Connie could muster it. She squeezed the air until her half-hollow ached. Then she let go of the grenade and twisted away, shielding her face.

A thousand years' worth of hoarding exploded, blasting apart under the wave of tremendous air pressure. Connie gaped at the geyser of Amethyst's possessions filling the air before the pressure wave caught her, flinging her backwards to the floor ahead of a rain of scattering garbage.

Groaning, Connie sat up and rubbed at her ringing ears. When she blinked her watery eyes clear, she grinned at the sight of Bismuth staggering back to her feet, the last bit of debris sliding clear of the smith's massive back. "Bismuth?" Connie half-shouted, struggling to hear herself above the ringing. "Are you—?"

The smith moved fast, so much faster than Connie had thought her capable of, too fast for a creature of her size. Bismuth's hand morphed into a long blade as she charged straight for Connie. A grim expression filled the Gem's features.

Connie shrank back, raising her hands. "Wait-wait-wait-don't!" Connie babbled. Again, too late.

Bismuth's weaponized arm struck, stabbing straight for Connie. Closing her eyes, Connie twisted to one side, hating herself for flinching. She wanted to feel brave in the face of her end. Instead, she only felt scared and sad. She would never get to apologize to the Gems for her mistake.

As the ringing in Connie's ears faded, she heard a choked wheeze coming from behind her. She cracked one eye toward its source, and then gaped fully in surprised at the sight of Hematite impaled beside her on Bismuth's arm. The corruption's spindly forelegs dropped from where they had hung poised to slice into Connie's back.

Tears filled Bismuth's eyes, but her cheeks remained dry. "I'm sorry," she murmured.

The corruption dissipated, swallowing Bismuth's arm in a reflective fog. Hematite's silvery gemstone clattered to the floor.

Connie shambled to her feet, watching as Bismuth collected the stone from the floor to cradle it in her huge palms. The smith's hands shook, and her eyes shimmered in the light of the cavern. "Are you okay?" Connie said.

Bismuth sniffled, but nodded. Then she smiled down at Connie and said, "Thank you to. That was some quick work back there, Gusty. You really pulled my stone out of the pulverizer."

"I think we're even," Connie replied, returning Bismuth's smile uneasily. "Um, now what?"

Silently, Bismuth began to concentrate on an empty spot nearby. The ground next to Bismuth rippled, pulsing upward into a tall new shape. As the gray surface solidified with a frame and a familiar pattern on its face, Connie recognized it as the temple door. A break formed in the door's face, and it parted diagonally, revealing the warp pad and the beach house beyond its frame.

Connie had never felt so glad to see her summer home as she stepped through ahead of Bismuth. The floor trembled with the Gem's heavy steps as she cast her wary gaze across the house. Hematite's stone still rolled in her open palm.

"Aren't we going to put her back where she was?" Connie asked warily.

Shaking her head, Bismuth held the stone aloft. A slate gray bubble manifested from her palm, enveloping the stone. With a little push, Bismuth placed the stone just outside the edge of the warp pad. It would be impossible for anyone entering or leaving the temple to miss spotting the captured stone.

"She's my messenger," Bismuth said. "Now the others will know that I'm out. And in the meantime…"

The smith's hands flashed into a set of thick tongs. Before Connie knew it, she felt the tongs gripping her waist, the tines pinning her arms to her sides. Bismuth lifted Connie without a hint of effort and stepped quickly onto the warp pad.

Panic and anger flooded through Connie. She tried to grasp onto any idea for escape. An air grenade powerful enough to knock her out of Bismuth's grasp would also turn her to paste at such a close range. Her Jade strength would be no match for the smith's, even if she could concentrate enough to summon it.

Then Connie saw a mound of pink fur in the far sunbeam across the room. Her lungs strained against Bismuth's grasp as she drew in a deep breath, and then screamed, "L—"

A chime rang out. The world around them vanished behind a curtain of rushing blue-white light.

"—ION!" The rest of Connie's scream vanished into the empty space beyond the wall of the tunnel. Snarling, Connie thrashed her legs and head, sending her long hair everywhere, struggling out of frustration more than any hope of escape. "Put me down!" she demanded.

"Just relax," Bismuth said in a clipped tone. "I'm taking us someplace safe where we can talk."

"Being picked up like a hot dog off a grill is not relaxing!" Connie retorted.

"I'm not sure what a hot dog is," Bismuth replied coolly, "but like I said, I'm taking us someplace safe."

Before Connie could muster another pithy rejoinder, she felt gravity return as the warp tunnel deposited them onto a new pad. The air burned her lungs, and she coughed, trying to expel the acrid stench of sulfur and ash.

A twilight sky glowed above them from behind thick, choking clouds. Something broad and towering blotted out the horizon, and as Connie squinted past her stinging tears, she saw the silhouette of a looming volcano. Their warp pad was in the volcano's shadow, surrounded on all sides by ashy, jagged stone.

Below them stretched a long slope, the only clear path from the pad, and Bismuth stepped down the trail in long, hopping strides. The path curved around the slope of the rocks, past a steaming ravine, then around a bubbling sulfur pool. Some of the Gem's leaps took them to the very edge of the path, giving Connie a clear view of the stomach-churning drop waiting below. But her surefooted captor never lost a step.

At last they arrived at the end of the path, where a flat slab of metallic stone stood in the cliffside. Nothing else waited for them, save for a precipitous drop beyond the path's edge and a handful of crumbling stairs opposite the slab, the possible remnants of a greater structure that had ceased to exist long before humans started writing histories.

As Bismuth faced the stone, her gemstone began to glow. The slab split open and split apart, revealing itself to be a door, and unveiling another slab behind it. This stone, too, split and parted, and another stone beneath it did likewise, and again, until the last of the cavalcade of doors ceased, and a stairway of concentric squares stood waiting to take them down into the heart of the mountain.

Connie's struggling quelled as Bismuth carried her down the steps. As frightened and angry as she felt, she couldn't help but marvel at the hidden structure. This place had weathered time and war better than any other Gem structure Connie had seen. The lines of the corridor were precise, as if drawn into the rock with drafting tools instead of chiseled or cut, and yet it still held the same beauty as any of the other relics had, evidenced by the ornate doors waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.

But if a mere stairwell earned her admiration, the room unveiled to her as those ornate doors parted blew Connie's mind. The chamber was a floor of clean, smooth stone, with flat-paned walls surrounding it, their faces split across with dark channels of glass. At the room's heart sat a massive anvil with a flattop that could have doubled as a small banquet table. The anvil stood within easy reach of large barrels of materials, their contents powdery and matte.

And there were weapons everywhere. Lances, maces, axes, war hammers, and swords. So many swords. Half-finished, hiltless, bladeless, discarded, sheathed and ready, boxed and stored, gathered by the bucketful. There was even a massive sword suspended overhead, a weapon longer than any car Connie's family had ever owned, a blade meant for some titanic fusion from a long-lost past.

Connie was so dumbstruck that she hadn't noticed the floor beneath her feet until Bismuth cleared her throat. The smith had set her captive down and returned her arm to its regular shape as she loomed above Connie.

"This is your forge," Connie said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. "I thought you were taking me someplace safe."

"That's right," Bismuth answered darkly. "Someplace safe for me."

The door behind Connie slammed shut.

"I know I missed a few more things since the last time I got poofed, but I'm no fool," Bismuth growled. Her hands clenched into fists as ominous and destructive as any hammer. "No human can just wander into a Gem structure by accident. I know because I used to build them. And I may not be good at biology, but I do know that humans definitely can't control wind like a Beryl can."

"I… I, um…" Connie stammered. She tried to back away, but Bismuth kept pace with her, taking one slow step for every three of Connie's stumbles. The hot metal of the doors pressed into Connie's back as the last of her retreating space ran out.

"You knew exactly who I was the moment I got out. I could see it in your face," Bismuth told her. "You're a human with Gem powers, just like Steven. Tell me who you really are. Tell me what's actually going on here. And tell me why you thought you could lie to me."

The or else in Bismuth's demand rang loudly in the glare she fixed upon Connie.

Chapter Text

Deep shadows veiled Bismuth. Only her eyes pierced the dark, two glittering coals that burned down upon Connie. The smith's broad body eclipsed the rest of her Forge from her captive's view.

"Um," stammered Connie, "I'm sorry?" The door pushed hard into her shoulder blades. She had no room left to back away.

"You've been lying to me," said Bismuth, her voice a rumble that Connie felt in her bones. "Or you've been keeping pieces of the truth from me, which is the same thing. I want to know everything you're not telling me. Now."

Her final word landed like a meteor strike.

Connie shivered. "I…I didn't…" she tried to say, but Bismuth's glare cut her silent. Any lie or excuse she tried to muster became ash in her mouth under the Gem's intense scrutiny. Swallowing thickly, Connie said, "W-What happens if I don't?"

Light flared, making Connie flinch as Bismuth's arms shifted. When the light faded, Bismuth hefted two enormous mallets where her hands had been, each weapon as big as a barrel. "The only way you're going to find that out is the hard way. Do you really want to know?" said Bismuth.

Connie felt her heartbeat kicking the inside of her ribs. Her thoughts raced under a thick blanket of fear. Try as she might, she couldn't reconcile the hulking menace before her with the barely restrained tears of the Gem who had saved Connie in Amethyst's room, or the horrified Gem who had seen a corruption for the first time in the Burning Room. This growling interrogation felt like a complete departure from everything else Connie had seen.

But perhaps that was the point.

Connie bit back her fear and said in as clear a voice as she could, "No."

"Smart. Then tell me what I want to know," snarled Bismuth.

"Sorry," Connie replied, "you misunderstood me. I meant: no, I won't tell you anything."

"I'm not playing with you, little human!" Bismuth slammed her hammers together above her head. The sound of it hit Connie like a physical force, knocking her into a crouch as the echo of it deafened the room.

Her knees quaking, Connie stood upright and met Bismuth's fury with a calm stare. "Then squish me," she said.

Apoplectic fire blazed in Bismuth's eyes. Rearing back, the Gem lifted both her hammers. The whole mountain seemed to quake with her bellow as she drew her whole body up for a killing blow.

Connie hated herself for flinching, but her body gave her no choice, forcing her eyes closed as she turned her head away. She trembled, and a tiny whimper slipped through her nose as her lungs clenched. But her feet remained planted, and her arms stayed locked at her sides.

For a long, long, moment, Connie remained noticeably unsquished. Then she felt the floor quiver beneath her. The air in front of her stirred. It took all of her courage to crack one eye for a peek.

When Bismuth had reared back, the Gem had continued rearing, backing all the way to the center of the room. With a bitter snarl, Bismuth whirled and slammed her hammers and her face all at once into her anvil, pounding all three against the flat top. She thumped herself onto the metal again and again, groaning between the ringing blows.

Eventually, though, she collapsed atop the anvil, and her groan became a guffaw. "Well, chisel me," Bismuth laughed into the anvil's top. "That move always worked on the humans who stole the iron out of my cooling racks. I guess you folks got wilier in the last five thousand years."

Slowly, Connie uncoiled herself from her premortem flinch, her eyes fluttering open in mild surprise at the laughing Gem. "Um, yeah. Once we figured out electricity, we had a lot of time on our hands to read," she said. After a breath of indecision, she added, "And if it helps, I wasn't completely sure, so I'm really glad I guessed that right."

Moving to lean her back against the forging block, Bismuth gave Connie an appraising look. "Guessed, huh?" she scoffed.

Connie had the good sense to look abashed. Nothing would stop Bismuth from squashing Connie for being a know-it-all if the Gem decided to change her mind. "You said you could see me keeping stuff from you from the start. That means you were onto me the whole time," Connie explained. "But when we were fighting Hematite, you went out of your way to save me twice, even when it got you buried under all that stuff. That didn't seem like something a real bully would do. Plus, you gave me a nickname."

Bismuth shook her head. "Not bad, Gusty," she admitted. Her hammers became hands once more, and she flicked one toward the far door as her Gem blinked with the motion. The double doors behind Connie slid apart once more, revealing the staircase out of the Forge. "Go on, then. You got me."

The tension in Connie's chest unknotted when she saw a way out of the Forge. But then it knotted again as she reached the bottom step, a thought suddenly occurring to her. She knew that any possibility of re-capturing Bismuth was long gone. Truthfully, she wasn't sure she would even consider such a thing anymore, even if it were possible. But Earth was a shockingly small planet, Gem-wise. Mutual isolation didn't seem like a real option either.

Their tenuous peace rang familiar to Connie, and she remembered a time not so long ago when another potential enemy had just needed someone to listen to her and talk with her.

"There's another way you could try this interrogation thing," Connie told the Gem. "You could ask nicely? I'm kind of a sword geek, so convincing me to hang out in a weapons forge wouldn't exactly be hard."

A slow smile crawled across the smith's features. "Say, Gusty," she intoned with a sweep of her arm, "would you care to stick around? Maybe I could show you the place, and you could catch me up on current events?"

"My name is Connie," she replied, returning the smile. "And I'd love to, thanks."

"Connie?" Bismuth repeated. "Yeesh. Stick with 'Gusty.' Much better."

As Connie finished, the full weight of her story settled in Bismuth, staggering the big Gem. Sagging against the wall, Bismuth slid to the floor, wrapping her hands over her knees to draw them under her chin. "Wow," she puffed.

"Yeah," Connie agreed, dragging her arm across her eyes to ease their sting. She sat atop the Forge's anvil, her heels knocking against its side as she came down from her storytelling high. Her body felt exhausted after the hours of catching Bismuth up on events she'd missed in-bubble, especially those that Connie had experienced firsthand. By contrast, Connie's half-hollow felt ready to burst, too full of the bad moments and hard times she'd had to stuff into it as she'd relived them.

"She gave up her gemstone to save you. I've never heard of anything like it," Bismuth marveled. Then she grimaced and said, "Well, I guess I've heard of one other thing like it. I just didn't believe it then."

Connie nodded. "That's when the Gems took me in. If I had any of Jade's memories, I'd know what I was doing. But I definitely don't."

Cheeks flushing, Bismuth said, "Can I, um, see her?"

Hooking a finger into her Herculoids shirt, Connie tugged on her collar to expose the top of the square stone. Bismuth rose and approached, staring in wonder at the imbedded gemstone.

"I'll never get used to seeing that," murmured Bismuth. "I never met a Jade before. Hard to believe some Homeworld hardliner would give herself up for anything less than a Diamond, let alone for a human."

Connie let go, and her collar jumped back into place. "Everyone was a Homeworld Gem once," she whispered, her gaze dropping to the floor.

Bismuth winced in self-reproach. "Too right," she admitted. "Okay, then. I think there's just one last thing I can't figure out."

"What's that?" asked Connie.

Fixing Connie with a meaningful look, Bismuth said, "What were you doing when you popped my bubble? When I got out, you looked scared enough to poof yourself. Why risk letting me out at all?"

That question had lurked under the surface of Connie's thoughts from the very first moment she'd set foot into the Burning Room alone. Not that she didn't know the answer to the question. She did. And she would have to be honest with Bismuth, with the other Gems, and with herself, no matter how much she didn't want to be.

"I was wishing you could make me a sword," Connie admitted.

Bismuth blinked. "Wait. Seriously?"

"Like I told you before, letting you out was an accident," Connie hurried to say. Her next words came slowly, each one a struggle to force out of her. "Before Jade and I, um, 'connected,' I was a swordfighter. A good one."

"You have the callouses for it," Bismuth noted, nodding down at Connie's wringing hands.

Connie raised an eyebrow. "You know what callouses are? I thought you were bad at biology."

Shrugging, Bismuth said, "Weapons are my business, which means I need to know what's swinging them. I didn't just make them for Gems, you know."

The brief detour made Connie smile, but her expression sobered as her thoughts returned to the real matter at hand. "Those bad Gems I told you about? They took my sword. Steven's sword. The one you made for Rose," Connie said. She felt her voice begin to tremble, her words tripping over each other. "And now it's like I'm completely useless. None of my new weapons last through a single fight. None of these powers Jade left me are working like they're supposed to. I keep getting in trouble, and getting in the way, and now I'm getting left behind, and I just…I need a sword. If I can just get a sword again, I know I'll be okay."

She sniffled, furious at the tears she had to blink back behind her eyelids.

Bismuth listened patiently until she'd finished. Then the smith rubbed her chin, her eyes wandering the edge of the room. "Just a sword, huh?" she said, and hummed thoughtfully. "Seems like an easy fix."

Connie hiccupped, her eyes growing huge as she watched Bismuth survey the room. She hadn't dared to hope for anything from the smith. But as her own eyes swept across the room, seeing the arsenal strewn throughout, she couldn't help but quiver in growing excitement. A new sword, a sword from Bismuth, would make her useful again. Surely that would help make up for the fact that she had accidently let the smith go. Wouldn't it?

"Okay. Why don't you take…that one," Bismuth said, and pointed.

Eagerly, Connie followed the gesture with her gaze. But as she craned her neck, she frowned in confusion, finding herself staring at the gargantuan sword suspended on chains from the ceiling. From pommel to tip, the weapon spanned half the breadth of the room, and its sheer mass must have numbered in the tens of tons. It was a weapon scaled for some titanic fusion the size of a building, not a thirteen-and-a-half-year-old human girl.

"Huh?" Connie said, stupefied.

Bismuth chuckled, and then sighed. "Do you seriously think you're the first Gem who's had problems with suddenly becoming something different, Gusty?" she said. "Every Crystal Gem I ever met went through the same thing when they started out. It took Garnet years to pull her selves together into somebody who could think straight, let alone fight. Pearl used to fall apart the minute Rose left her eyeshot. Empty Sky, it took me almost a decade to work up the stone to start brawling! I spent my time building bases and hiding inside of them, hating myself for being so scared."

"But—" Connie tried to interrupt.

The smith bulldozed through her objection. "You wouldn't believe how many new recruits I saw fall apart because they couldn't handle it, especially the ones who weren't built for fighting. Almost every single one of them would pick up a weapon thinking it would magically turn them into a warrior. Poor Hematite tried it as soon as she joined. She even got a Quartz her first time out." A weary fondness haunted Bismuth's features. "And that shook her up so badly, she dissipated herself right there on the battlefield. Spent the next five years locking herself in my Forge. Worked out for me, though, because I got to learn a lot of metallurgy from her. And I got to help her process what she needed to learn so she could get back into the fight."

"But I'm already a fighter!" Connie protested.

"Congratulations. You got the order mixed up, but it's still the same problem," Bismuth said. "You may not see it, but you've got a hole in you, Gusty. It's a big hole right where all your normal used to be, and you want to plug something into it that'll fill it back up so you can feel alright again. Well, I'm sorry, but there isn't anything in the universe big enough to plug a hole like that." Tilting her head up at the enormous sword, Bismuth added, "But that's the biggest thing I've got. So you're welcome to try."

Connie scowled up at the uselessly humongous blade. Part of her wanted to argue the point, to demand a new read, or at least a more reasonably sized offering. But the other part of Connie was half-hollow. A hole.

"Even if you're right," Connie grumped, "it still feels like you're making fun of me."

Bismuth grinned. "Look at it this way, then. I've seen what you can do. Maybe I don't want to give my weapons to somebody as dangerous as you are, at least not until I'm totally sure she won't stick it in me," said the Gem.

Despite herself, Connie felt the corner of her mouth twitch. "You know what? I'll take it," she said. Glancing upward, she added, "The sentiment, I mean, not the sword. I don't have anywhere to put it."

A chuckle turned into a deep sigh that pulled Bismuth into a full-body stretch. "Okay," said Bismuth, "I don't know about you, but it's been a big day for me. I escaped a bubble, poofed a friend, and caught up on five thousand years of some really awful stuff. I need to pound some metal to clear my mind."

Connie hopped down from the anvil, eager to take up the invitation to leave. Hunger pulled at the inside of her stomach, and she had needed a bathroom since before she'd finished her storytelling. But as she walked to the door, her body and mind taking full stock of the day's aches, she realized that one important question still remained unanswered.

Turning back at the door's threshold, she said, "Bismuth? What about you and Steven?"

The question struck Bismuth harder than any blow Connie had seen land on the big Gem all day. Bismuth swept her gaze across the floor in thought before she answered, "I think that's between me and him."

"No," Connie said. "It isn't."

Anger sparked again under Bismuth's furrowed brow, and she retorted, "You know what Rose did to me. That didn't go away when I got bubbled again."

"Steven isn't his mom," said Connie. The tension in her chest began tying itself into knots once more.

Bismuth didn't look entirely convinced. "Maybe not. And he poofed me honestly when we fought last time," she admitted. "But I don't have to like it. He and the others locked me away, just like Rose did. I don't have to like that either."

"You don't," Connie agreed. "I wouldn't. But I won't let you hurt him. If you try, I'll…I'll…"

"You'll what?" Bismuth's question wasn't the challenge Connie had expected. The smith's words were soft, genuine, with a shadow of regret behind them. Bismuth didn't seem angry or defiant at Connie's potential threat. She just seemed tired.

Connie deflated. "I'll do whatever I can. He's my best friend, Bismuth," she said.

Folding her arms, Bismuth lowered her head in thought. Then she began to shake with a nigh-silent laugh. "I think I might like you, Gusty. You've got too much of it where it counts," said the big Gem. "I'll make you a deal: if I decide that Steven and I have unfinished business, you'll know about it first, and you'll be there when it happens. I promise."

Any greater promise against future violence would have felt like a lie to Connie. She knew Gems worked out most of their bigger problems with blows when words wouldn't do. It could have been a side-effect of being able to regenerate their whole bodies on command. Maybe that's why squishy, vulnerable humans made better diplomats, or at least less violent negotiators.

"But," Bismuth added quickly, "You have to do something for me. Tell the others to keep their distance. I'm not ready to see them yet. When I am—if I am—I'll find them, not the other way around."

Speechless, Connie could only watch as the Gem's hands lifted and brushed over her shoulders. The dark, five-pointed stars marking Bismuth's arms flashed, then vanished, leaving pristine gray skin in their place.

Then the smith turned to her ore buckets, sifting through their contents, her back pointedly turned to Connie. The conversation was over, whether or not Connie agreed.

Connie watched the smith for a moment, wishing she could think of something else to say that could convince Bismuth to come back with her. She knew she should feel fortunate to walk away with an uneasy peace in place, but seeing the Gem in her darkened Forge alone didn't feel right.

In the end, though, Connie could only think to say, "Take care of yourself, Bismuth." And then she backed over the threshold. A wave from the Gem set the doors closing behind her.

Then, as the doors slid shut, Connie jolted with a horrible realization. "Wait, Bismuth, I can't—!"

The rumble of the doors overwhelmed her shout, and the two ornate stone panels slammed together with a resounding thoom. One by one, the stairs of the tunnel shifted, slamming vertically and crosswise in sequence to fill the stairwell with solid stone. The gray walls thundered closed in Connie's face, forcing her to scramble up the tunnel or be pulverized between the slabs. As she jumped through the final set of closing walls, she felt herself yanked backwards, and screamed.

Silence whistled around her. She cracked an eye open to find herself whole, not at all the paste she had expected to be. The stone slabs behind her had closed on her hair as she'd leapt, jerking her to a halt just beyond the jaws of death as she'd landed. With a little careful work, she managed to extricate herself without leaving behind more than a few strands.

"Bismuth!" she screamed, and pounded her fists against the now-featureless door. "Bismuth, I can't warp!"

Her cry echoed across the black valley. She beat the doors, howling, until her hands and voice were too raw to go on. Soaked in sweat, she collapsed backwards, staring up at the blank gray wall.

Slivers of milky color penetrated the clouds above the mountain range. Wherever Bismuth's Forge was, the sun was setting in that part of the world. When night fell, the world would be cast into pitch blackness beneath that choking blanket of volcanic smog.

With nowhere else to go, and no idea of how long she had to get there, Connie pushed to her feet and tilted herself up the path toward the warp pad. As she trudged uphill, a weight gathered inside of her. The quiet and solitude gave ample room for her thoughts to reflect on the day's antics.

Every mistake she had made received its own turn at center stage in her memory: her wasted training, her trip through a forbidden door, her disastrous windcidents, and as the grand closing act, he choosing to help Bismuth instead of poofing her. At the end of it, her mistakes all gathered for curtain call, and Connie could feel the full weight of them combined as they lined up for their bow. Together, they were a magnificent show of failure.

By the time she reached it, the warp pad was a bare glimmer in the dark. The only light remaining came from the red maw of the volcano looming over her. She collapsed onto the pad, momentarily grateful for the feel of smooth crystal instead of hot, rough rock. Her relief faded, however, when she remembered that she was just as stuck here as she had been in the Forge.

"Okay," she croaked, her throat prickling in the sulfurous miasma. "You're here. Now warp."

The crystal remained dark. Her shadow stared back at her from the red glare reflecting in its surface.

"You already jumped today. That's one power. Let's go for two," she coughed. "Warp."

Nothing.

Her eyes wobbled, cutting hot, wet lines down her cheeks as she squeezed them shut. Connie couldn't really blame the warp pad. She didn't believe herself either. As tired as she felt, she knew that going back to the beach house would mean revealing what she had done. No self-respecting pad would warp someone where they didn't really want to go.

"I just want to go home," she whispered, doubled over with her forehead pressed to the crystal.

A chime filled the air, and Connie's vision turned white behind her eyelids. She jerked upright to see the flowing luminance of a warp stream surrounding her. As her hair levitated in the tunnel's grasp, she felt the weight begin to lift from her.

Then the tunnel vanished, and she found herself still in the volcanic mountains. The pad had taken her nowhere. Instead, new shapes surrounded her on the pad, moving silhouettes that hid behind the spots the bright light had burned into Connie's vision. Before Connie could adjust to the dark again, the silhouettes converged on her, looming above her tiny frame.

"Connie!" the largest silhouette sobbed in relief.

Blinking hard, Connie uncoiled herself from her fetal curl and squinted. The largest shape resolved itself, becoming fuzzy in the volcano's glare, with a tail flicking to and fro behind it. It was Lion, who stared down at her through the dark with big, bright eyes. A second pair of eyes hovered above his, and an instant later Connie recognized Steven astride the big cat, looking at her as though he would burst into tears at any moment.

As she looked around, Connie saw the other shapes as Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl. All three Gems stood poised with weapons drawn, their faces grim and red in the scant light. As they looked around, realizing that the danger they'd prepared for simply wasn't waiting for them, their glowers came to rest on Connie instead.

"Guys," said Connie, "I messed up."

"Wow, you really did mess up," Amethyst remarked, sounding impressed.

Connie swallowed and tried to shrink into her clean shirt. Once they'd returned to the beach house, the Gems had insisted she shower and eat something before discussing anything else. The brief reprieve only made Connie dread the impending fallout more, wishing that they would just get it over with. But now that they all stood gathered on the porch and the moment had come, Connie wished she had savored that hot shower and cold leftover pasta salad for much, much longer.

The Gems had lined up in front of her. Between the three of them and the looming presence of the temple's figure above them, Connie felt like a bug caught at the wrong picnic. Steven hung off to the side, squirming in the wake of her story of the day's events.

"I'm shocked, Connie," Pearl said, shaking her head. "You know the temple isn't some place to…to…carouse!"

"I wasn't carousing," Connie mumbled. But she hung her head and winced.

"Look, in her defense, the temple is pretty tantalizing," Amethyst said.

"It's dangerous," Garnet retorted. Fixing her visor on Connie, she continued, "You already knew why it's dangerous. And you proved how dangerous it is with your carelessness."

"She didn't mean to!" Steven insisted.

Scratching her head, Amethyst said, "So, like, how did she even get in? Did somebody leave the door open? I didn't think that was even a thing, or else I probably would have done it on accident already. Not that this is my fault," she added quickly, eyes darting between the other Gems.

Connie un-turtled from her shirt, her curiosity rising up through the massive ocean of guilt atop her. That had been the only real question left to elude answers.

Frowning, Pearl looked back through the door's screen to the temple door at the back of the house. "If a Gem is let inside, she can forge a connection to the temple so it will recognize her for access. But it has to be a conscious choice, and it takes effort."

"Oh, yeah!" Amethyst said, brightening. "Like when Rose helped me add my room to the temple! Man, that was a lot of work."

"A human's mind is so different from ours," Pearl mused aloud, "so I suppose it's not impossible for the temple to interpret something subconscious and form a connection. But it seems so unlikely!" Her troubled gaze turned back to Connie, her expression caught in a war between confusion and worry.

Amethyst guffawed, and she chucked Connie on the shoulder. "You connected to the temple without even trying? Lucky!" she exclaimed.

The words lifted a tiny rock up from the depths of Connie's ocean of guilt, a small relief for her to crawl onto for survival. She had been enraptured with the mysterious temple ever since Steven had shown her its impenetrable door. Their trip together into his room had only amplified her obsession. Now bonded to a gemstone, Connie might register to the temple as someone worthy of access.

Then Garnet's sharp words fell upon Connie, dashing her tiny rock of optimism to pebbles and plunging her back into that ocean. "Not luck," the tall Gem insisted. "An accident. Connie, you need to understand how dangerous your powers are when you can't control them. The real luck is that you didn't pop every bubble in the room."

"You showed incredibly poor judgment going down there. We're not mad," Pearl said, lifting her nose. "We're just disappointed."

"We're a little mad," Garnet said.

Sighing bitterly, Pearl admitted, "Fine, yes, we're a little mad. But mostly disappointed."

Connie balled her fists at her side, squeezing every muscle she had to try and hold back her tears. "Is…Is that it? Do I need to pack my bags?" she whispered, fighting and losing against the quaver in her voice.

"No!" cried Steven.

Pearl's hard expression softened, and she knelt to put a hand on Connie's shoulder. "Of course not," the Gem assured her.

"Yeah," Amethyst scoffed, "you think you can just make a big mess and then bail on it? That's my job. And sometimes Greg's job."

"You're allowed to make mistakes, Connie," Pearl told her. Grimacing, she continued, "This is a bit bigger of a mistake than I'd expected, I'll admit. I was hoping you would just blow up part of the house. That, we know how to handle. The important thing is that you learn from your mistakes, and you try to fix them." Something twinged in Pearl's face as she said it, a note of self-recrimination fighting to stay hidden.

"What matters now is what we do next," Garnet said. Some, though not all, of the edge had been blunted out of her voice. "We still have enemies on Earth. Maybe Bismuth is one of them, or maybe she isn't."

"We're not going to hat up and go get her, are we?" Amethyst said, her expression souring at the notion.

"No. For now, we do what she asked. We give her time and space. Then we see what she does with it," said Garnet.

The ominous words gave way to uncomfortable silence. Connie wished she could just fold herself down into her shoes. She felt that low anyway.

"Sheesh, okay already," Amethyst said. Stepping around the other two, she slung an arm around each Gem and steered them toward the screen door. "She gets it. Enough with the riot act. Don't make me do something dumb to remind you guys what a real screwup looks like."

Pearl went along with the gentle reproach, but Garnet lingered at the door to look back. "We're glad you're safe, Connie," she said before following the others inside.

Neither teen moved until they heard the temple door open and shut, leaving them with the house to themselves.

"So…crazy day," Steven said, his grin as flimsy as his easygoing tone. "But, hey! You managed to Gem-jump all on your own. And you can open the temple! That's pretty amazing, right?"

Connie answered with a grunt. Slinking to the rail, she rested her forehead against the wood and tried to will her awful day to end.

"Hey, um, Connie?"

His nervousness made her look up. "What's wrong?" she said.

Steven opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it. Shaking his head, he said, "Never mind. It's stupid."

"No," she insisted, instantly roused from her gloom. Maybe her day had gone down in flames, but if she could help Steven in some way, it would make her feel a little better. "What is it?"

"You…" He fidgeted, and the words came crawling out of him. "You didn't let Bismuth out on purpose because you wanted a sword. Did you?"

The bottom dropped out of Connie's stomach. "…no. Of course not," she said.

He smiled. "Yeah. Like I said, it was stupid. I knew you'd never…" Biting his lip, Steven grabbed the conversation and heaved it in a new direction. "How about dinner? Or, I guess second-dinner for you, but we could always—"

"I should call my parents," Connie interrupted, digging out her phone. "I promised I'd let them know whenever I did something dangerous, and it's almost time for our daily call anyway."

"Oh. Okay. Well—"

Connie put the phone to her ear and marched down the steps of the porch, stomping onto the beach. She kept her phone raised and her back to the house until she heard the screen door creak and then close. Only then did she risk a teary glance over her shoulder.

She couldn't blame Steven for thinking such a thing. He wasn't far off from the truth. But it hurt all the same.

Chapter Text

Connie hated the day. She hated the sunshine, and the birdsong threading through the trees swaying gently above her, and the laughter of tourist families drifting up from the beach, and the clear, cloudless sky. Every stupid part of that wonderful day wanted to mock her for her foul mood. So she doubled down on her misery in the face of the overwhelming pleasantness.

She had gotten up at the first light of dawn, dressing in the bathroom and then creeping across the kitchen for a couple of Protes bars. Then she'd opened the screen door as slowly as possible, squeezed herself through as small a gap as she could, and closed the door just as slowly, all so she could be certain of leaving with Steven still asleep.

Dressed for a long day outside, Connie turned her morning run into a long, angry trudge through the back streets of the town. She wanted to stay as far away from the beach and everything near the beach for as long as she could. Her silenced phone, heavy scowl, and raw, angry determination all combined to guarantee her a miserable solitude that would last the morning.

Her half-hollow pulled hungrily at her mood, but she denied it. This was a foul mood to be savored. She would stew in it, let it simmer, and only feed it into her half-hollow when she was done with it.

The plan worked flawlessly all morning. She stomped a crisscross path through the residential streets, and rolled rocks down the hill next to the road out of town, glowering at the trickle of inbound tourists. Unfortunately, it was the other hollow inside of her, the one shaped like her stomach, that betrayed her around midday. Apparently the cost of her body's loyalty was more than just two protein bars.

Connie and hunger were old acquaintances thanks to her days of eating only ¡Soy Delicioso! bars. But the memory made her half-hollow ache even harder than her stomach, and she reluctantly headed for the boardwalk to silence both hollows.

"Connie? Hey, look out!"

Pulling her glare off the pavement, Connie startled backwards onto the curb and let a sparkling clean car roll past her. She had grumped all the way down to It's A Wash at the corner of town on autopilot, and would have eaten bumper if not for the timely shout. Following the sound of the voice back to its source, she saw Greg Universe watching her with concern, a coil of hose looped over his shoulder.

"Gotta keep your head on a swivel during the busy season. I've already seen fifteen cars today, and I washed three of them!" Greg joked as she trudged over to join him in the car wash lot. When she met his cheer with a sullen look, his smile melted. "Whoa. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, thanks," she said, ducking her head and stuffing her hands into her pockets.

He gave her a long, searching look that made her think she hadn't convinced him. Finally he motioned for her to follow him, and said, "C'mere. I have something I want you to try."

She followed, managing to keep her sigh only semi-audible. Her impatience turned to confusion, however, as he led her to a folding lawn chair set up in the shade of the car wash.

"Now, you sit there," he said, and pushed her gently into the chair. As she watched with confusion, he collected a bucket and fiddled with another hose already hooked up to a faucet. Dropping the bucket in front of her, he said, "Lose the shoes and stick your feet in this."

Connie complied, stuffing her bare feet into the bucket. "What are you—Yeow!" Her question became a shriek as Greg un-kinked the hose, dumping a flood of icy water onto her feet. She almost fell out of her chair trying to keep the bucket upright as the rising water swallowed her ankles.

Greg beamed and said, "I call it the Car Wash Reverse Sauna. When it's hot and humid out, nothing feels better. Except air conditioning. And ice cream. An oscillating fan, driving fast with the windows down…" His smile grew chagrinned, and he rubbed the back of his neck. "Okay, but it's still Top Ten for beating the heat. Right?"

As the shock wore off, Connie felt herself sink back into the chair. She hadn't realized how much hotter it felt on the pavement and up the hill as compared to the sea-breezy beach. Already she could feel herself cooling down. "Yeah," she agreed. "Thanks."

"You looked like you needed to cool off a little," said Greg. Once the bucket was filled, he leaned back against the brick and doused his own sandals before kinking the hose again. "Nothing makes a bad day worse like sweating through your shorts."

A prickle ran under Connie's skin. "What makes you think I'm having a bad day?" she challenged him.

His smile turned wry. "Your face," he answered calmly. "Your voice. The way you watch your feet when you're crossing the road. And the fact that I saw you looking exactly the same a couple hours ago when you stomped by."

She sank into the chair pulling her shoulders up around her ears. "Guess I'm not exactly a tough riddle to solve today," she groused.

Greg shrugged and said, "I don't think people are like puzzles. They're more like…people. Messy. Complicated. That's what makes them wonderful." He winked and added, "But you do look like you're having a rough time. Anything you want to talk about?"

"Not really," Connie mumbled into her chest.

He hesitated before saying, "Did something happen with Steven?"

"No!" Connie blurted, and knew immediately that her answer had been too loud and too fast to mean anything except yes. Feeling her cheeks warm with embarrassment, she collapsed back against the chair. "Did he tell you?" she groaned.

Greg shook his head. "Nah. But he did text me when he couldn't find you this morning. I let him know I'd seen you walking around, and that you were okay." Worry lines gathered above his brow. "Are you okay?"

A mighty sigh rolled through her. She didn't have the willpower to relive the previous day's events again, at least not in substantial detail. "I messed up yesterday," she huffed, folding her arms. "I did something bad that put everybody at risk. Especially Steven. The Gems got mad at me, and Steven kind of called me on what I did."

His mouth tightened. "Oof," he said.

"No, the real 'oof' is that the Gems are right to be mad at me, and Steven has every right to call me on it," Connie exploded and threw up her hands. "Now I have to fix what I did, only I don't know how, or what 'fixing it' would even look like. You helped talk my parents into letting me stay here so I could figure out this stuff with Jade's gemstone, and now I'm not only failing at that, I'm making everything else worse! And stomping around isn't going to do anything about it, but since I can't think of any other ways to not mess up again, I'd rather feel mad about everything, because if I didn't, I'd be sad, so all I can do is be mad at everyone, even though I'm really just mad at myself!"

The avalanche of words left her breathless. She panted, and then finally noticed the dumbstruck expression on Greg's face. Only then did she realize that she had been yelling at an adult for almost a solid minute. The realization made her clap her hands over her mouth and shrink, horrified at what she had done.

Greg, though, didn't seem phased by her rudeness. If anything, his eyes grew warmer as he considered her, saying, "That's about an album's worth of problems you're packing, all right. I'm sorry you're having such a tough time right now."

Connie let her hands drop, all but melting with relief into the bucket at her feet. "I just wish I knew what to do, or where to start," she groaned.

"Do you mind if I give you a piece of advice?" he asked.

She came back to life in an instant, upright and attentive, leaning so far forward that she nearly fell into the bucket. "Yes. Please!" she exclaimed.

"Do nothing," said Greg.

For three long beats, Connie waited for the next part of the advice. Do nothing until… or Do nothing, and then… But Greg's satisfied expression and tight lips made Connie realize that she had already received his counsel in its entirety.

"Do nothing," she repeated, confused.

He nodded. "You're so twisted up right now that anything you think of is only going to make you feel worse. So the best thing you can do for yourself is to just give it time. Take a day off just for you. Put everything on the back burner and do something else," he told her.

"But that won't solve anything!" insisted Connie.

"I can't tell you how many times I've been stuck for weeks on how to finish a song, only to figure it out when I started doing something else. I clean out the car wash, or I go get some ice cream with Steven, and then bam! The notes or lyrics or whatever just hit me." He nodded, looking confident in his own sagacity. "You never really stop thinking about it, but if you distract yourself from how frustrated you are, your brain can put it all together."

She bit her lip, teetering at the edge. It felt like a betrayal of her purpose for being in Beach City to abandon everyone and goof off all day. Shouldn't she be training her powers, or thinking of some way to make things right with the Gems? With Steven?

But she had spent her entire morning pouting an fuming, and pointedly not doing any of that other stuff anyway. Letting her back-burner brain take a crack at all her problems would at the very worst be a lateral move. And her half-hollow was almost as hungry for the bad mood she'd been percolating as her stomach was for something more substantial than protein bars.

With another long sigh, Connie let her misery seep into her half-hollow. The void eagerly slurped all her anger and frustration, her guilt, and every other dark thing she'd held onto all morning. When only the cold, abstract problems remained, Connie pressed them back. They disappeared into some corner of her, leaving the rest of her mind clear.

When she inhaled again, it felt like the first surfacing gasp taken after a long, desperate swim underwater. "Okay," she said. "I'll try."

Greg smiled. "I'm glad. And hey, don't forget, when you do feel ready to talk about it, I'm always happy to lend an ear. Or a hose and bucket."

"Thanks, Mister Universe," said Connie, smiling in kind.

"No problem. We gotta look out for each other, remember?" He held up his hand in offering. "Human beings?"

"Human bei—" She started to return his high-five, but stopped.

"Why, you may already be as far removed from your former humanity as Steven is from his Rose Quartz mother!"

"You may not see it, but you've got a hole in you, Gusty. It's a big hole right where all your normal used to be…"

Peridot's and Bismuth's words rang in her mind. She lowered her hand, touching the gemstone peering out from the collar of her tank top.

Even with her eyes on her waterlogged feet, Connie could see the look of horror that flashed across Greg's face. He covered it up quickly with another smile, this one a little less fulsome than the last. "You know what? High-fives are old people stuff. I've been meaning to 'fresh-up' my style." He curled his fingers and offered her his fist. "Earthlings?"

Connie considered his fist and his shaky smile. She knew Greg meant well and wanted to help her. It wasn't his fault that she had been accidentally hybridized with a lost alien soldier who had sacrificed herself to protect Connie from her own horrible choices. Besides, all of that was supposed to be on the back burner. She could resume that particular freak-out later.

"Earthlings," she agreed, and tapped his knuckles with hers.

His relieved smile made her feel better for her little fib.

Then her gaze caught something moving on the far side of the road. She frowned and said, "Wait. Who is that?"

Greg looked, and his expression sobered. "Oh. Don't worry about him."

Connie felt surprised by his nonplussed reaction. The figure in question couldn't have elicited more suspicion if he'd tried. He was a boy, mid-to-late teens, wearing a desert camo shirt and matching fatigue pants that were a size too large for his stocky frame. A matching camo duffel bag hung from his shoulder. The glare of the midday sun hid his eyes behind his large, thick glasses, but his eyeline was obvious as he looked to and fro and back over his shoulder, seeming as though he expected ambush at any moment. The motion made his thick, curly golden locks bounce and sway atop his head.

But what drew Connie's attention more than anything else was the sword strapped to his back: a katana, or so she deduced from the relative shape and size. The hilt of it was fashioned with the leering, snarling face of a dragon at the very top.

"That's the Frymans' oldest son, Ronaldo," said Greg. "He's harmless."

"He's got a sword!" Connie insisted.

"Mostly harmless," Greg said, correcting himself.

Connie's eyes narrowed, following Ronaldo's skulking all the way down the road until he turned onto Boardwalk Street and disappeared from view. "It can't be safe letting a teenager run around with a sword like that," she declared.

Greg lifted an eyebrow. "Are you sure you want to throw stones inside that particular glass house?"

She hurried to smother her blush, trying to remain serious. "He's obviously up to something," she said. "Like, suspiciously obviously up to something."

"Well, maybe you could introduce yourself and ask him what he's doing," Greg suggested.

Her mind was already elsewhere, tracking the possible locations Ronaldo's direction would take him. She considered the direct approach, but it seemed risky to try blind. Better if she could figure out what Ronaldo was doing before she confronted him. With the experience of countless espionage missions under her belt—gleaned from spy novels, movies, TV shows, and the never-popular out-of-place stealth sequences in action video games—she felt confident that she could discover Ronaldo's scheme without alerting him.

"Maybe I will introduce myself," Connie said cagily, rising from the lawn chair. "If you'll excuse m—"

She tripped over the bucket she'd forgotten her feet were still in and sprawled onto the pavement. A puddle of water spilled around her, soaking through the front of her clothes.

After twenty minutes of flawless amateur espionage, Connie couldn't decide if Ronaldo was a mastermind or a lunatic. And that dichotomy was the only thing she had learned of the small-town Ronin.

His first stop had been to the back of Fish Stew Pizza. Using the reflection in a storefront window across the street to disguise her observation—a favorite technique of the titular MI-7 superspy from the Jaymes Stock movies—Connie had watched Ronaldo talking animatedly with Jenny. The older girl didn't seem impressed with whatever Ronaldo said to her, but when he handed her a CD of some kind, she seemed mollified, and nodded as he left her.

Information exchange? Connie wondered. A dead drop would be safer. Is he that confident?

The next stop took them around the block to the west side of town. Along the way, Connie pilfered a city guide from the visitor center and pretended to be a lost tourist—the preferred disguise of her favorite fictional farmer-turned-spy, Sara Hush, Harvest Hero—and saw Ronaldo slip into the local pawnbroker's store, Pawn the Other Hand. As she surveilled the establishment, with its barred windows and its sign featuring a cartoon mascot whose waving hand was comprised of dollar bills, Ronaldo appeared to complete some large transaction inside.

Weapons? Bomb components? Connie mused, staring sidelong at the overstuffed duffel now bulging with Ronaldo's purchases as he left. Also, the store's mascot makes no sense. If the guy's hand is made of money, why would he pawn it?

Finally, following a long and winding path back through the center of town, Connie tailed Ronaldo back to Lighthouse Park. She saw Ronaldo climbing the empty hill with purpose and deduced that his only possible destination was the lighthouse. So she broke off her pursuit at the park's edge and ran around the long way, sprinting up the hill at the very edge of the rising cliff to circle the entire park and beat her target there.

She kept her body low, trying through sheer force of will to make her red tank top blend in with the grass. With more time she could have waited for night, or belly-crawled after him, or fashioned a ghillie suit out of lawn clippings and chewing gum. But she needed to be there when Ronaldo got to the lighthouse in the hopes of finding out what his next move would be. So she settled for running on the wrong side of the picket fence at the cliffside, ducking behind its planks for some cover until she reached the back of the tall white tower at the cliff's peak.

Panting, scrambling, Connie hopped the fence and hid herself in the modest greenery surrounding the base of the lighthouse. She circled toward the small house built into the front of the tower, trying to glimpse Ronaldo coming.

He already stood at the door, out of sight around the corner. Connie could hear the rattle of his keys in the lock. Then the sound abruptly stopped, and a voice thundered from the font of the house. "I know you're there. Reveal yourself!"

Connie gulped. She'd let her ambitions outweigh her opportunities, exactly as Bjørn Gunnarsson had in the Scandinavian thriller The Bjørn Identity. With nowhere left to hide, and no specific pop culture reference for escaping from a bush unseen, Connie shimmied out of the shrubbery and rounded the corner with her hands raised in surrender.

Ronaldo waited for her just out of sight, pressed up against the building. As she shuffled into view, his eyes bugged behind his glasses. "Assassin!" he screamed, and reached for the hilt behind his shoulder.

The next second-and-a-half went by in a blur. Connie didn't know immediately what had happened. She only knew that, in the aftermath, Ronaldo was curled in the fetal position on the ground, wheezing through his shirt, which had been pulled up over his head, and that Ronaldo's sword was in her hand. Quickly she lowered the tip of the blade and reviewed the order of events in her head.

Ronaldo had gone for his sword. Reacting, Connie had buried her knuckles in his solar plexus, driving the air out of his lungs and dropping him to his knees. Her right hand had fished the collar of his shirt up the back of his neck and over his head, blinding him, while her left hand had yanked the sword from its sheath. Then she'd stepped backwards and let him collapse in front of her. Remembering the events took five times as long as the events themselves that taken.

Reversing her grip, Connie tucked the blade behind her and knelt down next to her would-be attacker. "Hey, um, are you okay?

"You bested me," Ronaldo groaned through his shirt. "Finish the job. Just make sure my family finds the body. I want them to have closure."

"What? No!" Connie exclaimed, taking a large step back from him. "Sorry, I just reacted when you went for your…weapon…"

With no urgency to cloud her senses, Connie got a better sense for the sword in her hand, and realized that it barely warranted the moniker. It had terrible balance, and she could feel the blade shifting in its setting. A glance revealed that the dragon-sculpted hilt had a seam down the middle: molded plastic. She felt lucky that the thing hadn't broken on its way out of its sheath.

As he crawled back to his feet, his face popped back through his collar with a suspicious look at the ready. He fixed his glasses on his nose and wheezed, "Don't lie to me. I know you've been following me."

"Uhhh…" Connie began to sweat.

Regaining more of his breath, Ronaldo smirked and said clearly, "I clocked you tailing me since I got to the park."

The sweating abated. "Okay, yes," Connie admitted, "I was following you. But not to hurt you. You're dressed weird, and you're carrying a weapon, so I wanted to know what you're doing." As an afterthought, she flipped the sword around and offered it to him hilt-first.

Ronaldo gave her a searching look as he collected his sword. It took him three tries to sheathe the blade. "So," he drawled, eyes narrowing, "you, too, are a seeker of the unusual. Not like the unassuming masses who populate our fair hamlet."

One corner of her mouth pulled taut, and Connie agreed, "I do see a lot of strange things."

"What's your name, my not-assassin?" he said.

"Connie."

"Hmm. Steven texted me this morning asking me to look for a 'Connie' who matches your description. Curious." He leaned down suddenly, and Connie fought a new impulse to put him back on the ground as his face pressed close to hers. "My world is a dangerous one, Connie. It's filled with mystery and intrigue. I look into the dark corners of our world for the things that don't want to be found. For the things that shouldn't be found. Because they have to be. Found, I mean. Do you have what it takes to face a reality that the rest of the world would rather ignore?"

Her curiosity burned, and her nose wrinkled at the smell of French fry breath. "Yes," she said.

He pulled back, brightening, and jingled his keys. "Cool! Let me show you what I've been working on."

Ronaldo opened the door and led her through a small, dilapidated house, around a large hole in the floor that had been boarded over with a sheet of plywood, and up a set of rickety spiral stairs. They ascended into the lantern room of the tower, where the defunct beacon sat unlit and unmoving at the center, surrounded by short walls of wood and high, dingy windows caked in grime. A vague mustiness filled the air with the memory of the lighthouse's long vigilance, a sense of rest after so many generations of protecting ships from the shoals.

The curved walls of the lantern room were papered with hundreds of clippings. There were news articles printed or cut from the papers, pictures of all sorts and shapes, most of them too blurry to feature a discernable subject, and bridging all of it were handwritten scrawlings on an office building's worth of U-Post notes. Taut, multicolored lines of yarn tied around push pins connected the pictures and articles into five or six distinct webs.

If Connie hadn't seen Ronaldo's relative harmlessness for herself, she might have thought she was entering the lair of a serial killer. But then, a lack of bad intentions didn't prevent someone from making a mess by accident. Connie had proven that the day before.

She shook off the clingy thought, tucking it back into her half-hollow where it belonged, and followed Ronaldo around the circumference of the room. "What is all of this?" she asked, turning in a circle to take in everything.

"These are my current investigations," said Ronaldo. He dumped is bag onto a worktable tucked up against the dark beacon. As he unzipped the bag, a wealth of junk spilled out onto the tabletop. There were dozens of little plastic boxes and shapes, small devices bought secondhand from Pawn the Other Hand. "I use this place to prep my gear and analyze the intelligence I've gathered."

The nearest board caught Connie's eye. She glanced over the various clippings, reading each one the instant her gaze came to rest on the text. "Petty theft at a bunch of Buy n Large stores?" she said.

"That one's gone cold this week," he called from the table. "A bunch of intergalactic robots are stealing appliances from big-box stores to resurrect some ancient super-thing. I'm waiting on a few more hits to discern a pattern. Check out the next board over. That's what I'm after today."

Incredulous, Connie shuffled sideways to the next board. This wallpapering had only two articles appended to it, both of them about missing cars that had broken down off of I-95. The rest of the board consisted of a few pictures, some sketches done in charcoal, and a journal's worth of notebook pages torn and taped to the wall. "The corn shark?" she said, reading the board's header aloud.

Shaking his head, Ronaldo said, "Not 'the corn shark.' It's 'The Corn Shark.' You have to say it capitalized. It's a cryptid that started appearing near Beach City within the last year."

"Cryptid," echoed Connie. "You mean like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster." She had read several books on the subject when she was younger, but the idea of real-world monster hunting had never garnered much interest in her. Tromping through mosquito-infested woods looking for a monster nobody could prove existed didn't seem like much fun. Much better to go looking for monsters that did exist, like corruptions and Gem invaders.

"More or less correct. Except this isn't one of those famous cryptids. This isn't a Jersey Devil or a Wet-Winged Window Wailer. This one was previously undiscovered!" Ronaldo said enthusiastically.

None of the articles Connie instantly read had made mention of a corn shark, or a Corn Shark, or had even used a word like cryptid. "It kind of seems like it's still undiscovered," Connie hedged.

She yelped as Ronaldo appeared behind her without warning and cried, "Exactly! Do you know what it would mean if I could bag a completely new monster? That would put my blog on the map! People would talk about Keep Beach City Weird in the same sentence as Ominous Anonymous and Big-dot-Foot!" He cleared his throat, seemingly remembering to add, "And also, y'know, make the roads and fields safe again. Whatever."

The many sketches and interpretations of the neophyte cryptid loomed in front of Connie. Each one was a fanciful imagining of some enormous beast, fifteen feet long, with corncob teeth and leafy scales decorated in golden tassels. The clearest image on the board was a grainy photograph, which depicted a triangular fin poking up from a crop field, its size fitting the scale Ronaldo's sketches imagined of the beast.

"You're going to face this thing?" Connie said incredulously.

"Today," affirmed Ronaldo. He found a soldering iron and plugged it into a dusty yellow wall socket below the murder board.

Connie considered the cryptid hunter, with his strip mall sword, his camo for the wrong biome, and his bevy of pawned electronics, most of which appeared to be secondhand baby monitors and gutted flip phones. The sum total of Ronaldo seemed unequal to the task of writing a book report about cryptids, let alone hunting one.

There was a good chance that any nearby "monster" would be a Gem corruption, not some heretofore unheard-of creature, which meant it would definitely be a threat to anything nearby, including Beach City. Worse, the sightings could be a sign of some trick or scheme being enacted by Shard's forces in an effort to establish mayhem close to the temple. Left unchecked, such a thing could spell disaster for all of them.

And besides, Connie was supposed to be keeping her mind on something besides her own problems with Steven and the Gems. The chance to hunt a monster without them didn't come along every day.

"Can I help?" Connie asked Ronaldo, grinning.

Chapter Text

"Are you guys serious?" Jenny said, shouting over the roar of the wind and the pulsing bassline that rattled their car down to its frame.

"We're deadly serious," said Ronaldo. He squinted at the road ahead, his curly locks billowing as they sped toward their confrontation.

"We're medium-serious," Connie jawed, struggling to talk around a mouthful of pizza.

The Pizzamobile sped down an old country road with Jenny at the wheel and an insulated pizza bag in the coveted shotgun seat. Connie and Ronaldo sat in the back, tagging along on Jenny's delivery to the extreme edge of the restaurant's delivery radius.

Space in the back was tight, with Ronaldo's duffel bag stuffed between them, which meant that the emergency pizza had to sit on Connie's lap. It was a pepperoni and cheese with no delivery of its own and no one else to claim its warm, gooey deliciousness, so Jenny had told them to help themselves. Connie thought the idea of an emergency pizza seemed odd, but Jenny insisted that it had come in handy more than once, and that more pizza could only improve any situation. Carrying the emergency pizza was a heavy burden to bear, but Connie had made it lighter by eating as much of it as she could. Only to justify Jenny's sound logic, of course.

Jenny shook her head at the semi-serious pair. "Shark hunting. I swear, you're lucky you have the hookup in the underground French chiphop scene, or you'd be walking to all your monster nonsense."

The teen's fingertips tapped the steering wheel to the beat of Jeu à Deux Terminé pounding out of the car stereo, suggesting to Connie that she wasn't quite as irritated as she tried to sound. But it was hard to be sure over the noise, the wind, and the sound of her own chewing, so Connie focused on taking care of the pizza instead of worrying.

Ronaldo leaned forward and tapped Jenny's shoulder, pointing to the side of a featureless road in the middle of farm country. "Over there," he said, and added a hasty "please," when he saw Jenny's raised eyebrow.

Jenny pulled the car over to the dirt shoulder of the road and rolled them to a gentle stop. Turning the stereo down, she twisted around and said, "Are you sure you don't want to ride the whole way? My delivery is about half a mile up the road. Might not be a bad idea to have somebody around for whatever it is you're doing. In case anybody needs to call an ambulance? Again?"

The way Jenny said that last part made Connie wonder how often Ronaldo's adventures ended in ambulances. But she was committed to the course now. Wolfing down another slice of pizza as she climbed out of the car helped to ease her concerns.

Ronaldo heaved his duffel bag out of the seat ahead of him and stepped out of the car while Connie chewed and followed. "No," Ronaldo declared, and gestured to the waving fields of green stalks to either side of the road. "Our place is here. These fields will be the crucible in which we are both forged into men of destiny."

"Mmm'kay," grunted Jenny. "You gonna need a pickup later?"

"Did Achilles need a pickup from the gates of Troy? Did Leonidas, from Thermopylae?" challenged Ronaldo.

Jenny stared at him, her expression a war between annoyance and bewilderment. Then she pointed at Connie. "You. Phone," she commanded, snapping her fingers.

Connie struggled down a mouthful of semi-intact pizza and then dug her phone out of her pocket. At Jenny's expectant look, she unlocked it and handed it over. Her confusion only grew as Jenny shoved her own phone into Connie's hands.

"Put your number in there," Jenny instructed, already doing the same in Connie's phone. "Text me or call me if you need to get out of here."

"Oh!" Connie's thumbs worked on autopilot to comply while the rest of her jolted with surprise. "I don't want to make you go out of your way, especially not after you're done with work."

Jenny laughed as they traded back phones. "Are you kidding me? After Steven texted me this morning half-crazy because he couldn't find you? If anything happens to you out here because of this one," she said, and hooked her thumb in Ronaldo's direction, "that kid would live in my phone looking for you." Then she grinned and added, "Besides, now I can let you know when everybody's getting together to hang out."

"Yeah? I mean, yeah!" Connie beamed. A hint of marinara oozed at the corner of her mouth, and she hurried to wipe it with the back of her hand. "Oh, now that I have your number, do you want me to Cashmore you for the pizza? There's not much left of it." The two slices that had survived her late breakfast were the skinniest and smallest of the original pie, and they had only been spared for lack of time, not for lack of hunger.

Her grin widening, Jenny just shook her head. "My friends don't pay for pizza while I'm around. Stay safe!" She gave the pair one final wave, sparing a look of warning at Ronaldo, and then gassed the car back onto the road. Her taillights vanished into a dust cloud while the thumping intro of C'est Peach boomed into the distance.

As the dust settled, Connie let herself sink into their new surroundings. Her family's home was in a fairly quiet suburb, which felt noisy next to the tranquility in Beach City. But the deep farmlands made both towns seem like noisy, bustling hubs by comparison. Once the sounds of the Pizzamobile faded into the distance, Connie and Ronaldo were left in utter silence.

Slowly but surely, though, the totality of that silence began to fade as they grew used to the fields. To either side of them, the golden tufts atop the corn stalks rustled under a breeze, rolling and waving like a landlocked tide. The sound of their feet grinding on the dirt seemed deafening as they walked to the grass at the fields' edge. Connie felt like an explorer who had wandered off her map, stumbling into some corner of the world that had been forgotten by human and Gem alike.

Then Ronaldo hefted the duffel bag, and the rattling contents jolted Connie out of her reverie. "We have arrived, my young protégé," he announced. "We're now in the depths of the Corn Shark's domain. Tread lightly if you don't want to be devoured."

The rows and rows of corn in front of them suddenly looked deeper and wilder. Connie grinned at the dangers hidden behind those leafy stalks and marched forward to meet the cryptid in its lair. Or rather, she attempted to, until Ronaldo's arm swung down to halt her march.

"Whoa! I was speaking metaphorically," he said. Then he produced a rolled-up spiral notebook from one of his many cargo pockets and offered it to her. "Before you're ready to hunt, you have to arm yourself. And the greatest weapon of all is knowledge. At least until my dad lets me buy tannerite."

Connie reluctantly took the notebook, unfurling it and flipping its cover. A wealth of college-ruled chicken scratch writing stared back at her. She began leafing through the pages, turning the notebook back and forth to read the double-sided notes. "What is all this?" she asked while she read.

"My notes on the Corn Shark. Before you can help me, you'll need to read everything I have on the noble beast." His glasses flashed with the reflection of the vast field before them. "It could take you hours. I've been studying it for a long time. Meanwhile, I'll have to brave the hunt alone. One man, facing down a shadowy world that would rather eat him than know him, that—"

"Done." Connie flipped the back cover of the notebook closed and returned it to Ronaldo. "I like the anatomy cross-sections. But pretty much all of your notes are conjecture. Like mating habits? You haven't even seen one of these things. How do you know what two of them do?"

Ronaldo's cheeks reddened. "Not conjecture! Extrapolation," he squeaked. "I made educated guesses from the information available."

Connie's face twisted with doubt. "Okay. But what about the five pages of drawings of you as an anime schoolgirl?"

"Copyright! Trademark!" Ronaldo shouted, clutching the notebook to his chest. "That's my original idea for a manga adventure series called Pretty Warrior Ronalda. It'll be my magnum opus as soon as I teach myself how to write, draw, publish, and distribute manga."

"Right," Connie said, drawing the word out for many, many syllables. "So, what now?"

Ronaldo pocketed the notebook and then lugged his duffel bag over his shoulder. His boots crunched through dry grass and then sank into the rich farmland soil. "Well, since you absorbed my notes so quickly, you must already know what to do next," he said over his shoulder.

Connie followed him into the edge of the green. She knew a test when she heard one. And she had studied, whether Ronaldo believed it or not. "Track its movements. Establish a pattern. Procure evidence of existence. Survive to disseminate evidence," she recited from the pages she had booked. Smirking, she added, "That's from page thirty-eight. Right across from the designs for Ronalda-chan's submachopter."

Rather than annoyed, Ronaldo looked delighted by her answer. "You're a quick study. And you clearly have an appreciation for personalized heroic airborne/undersea vehicles."

They trekked through the first few rows of corn, walking until the road behind them disappeared behind the leaves and stalks. Connie couldn't see any trace of a creature that swam through the crop. But then, she had no idea what sort of trace to look for. Sharks didn't leave footprints. Did land sharks leave footprints? Did Corn Sharks?

Ronaldo answered her silent pondering with a tug of his duffel's zipper. A bundle of long wooden stakes poked through the opening. Each stake had a wrapping of duct tape at its top that held an old baby monitor and some kind of small, dark, domed box half the size of Connie's fist. Scavenged wiring connected the black box and baby monitor through holes that had clearly been drilled through each device's casing, though Connie couldn't guess the reason behind the jury-rigging.

"We'll set these up every twenty meters or so in a grid pattern," explained Ronaldo. As demonstration, he drew one of the stake combos and, collecting a rubber-headed mallet from his endlessly deep cargo pockets, pounded the stake into the ground. Its duct-taped head stood about chest-high to Connie once he had finished.

"And these are…?" she prompted him.

With a look of extreme satisfaction, Ronaldo flicked a switch on the stake combo's baby monitor.

The air rattled with a squalling, piercing electronic wail from the baby monitor's speaker. Connie clapped her hands to her ears, but she could still feel the sound resonating in her skull. If Ronaldo had told her that the other end of the monitor was hooked to the crib of an infant banshee with colic, she would have believed him without question.

"I rewired the baby monitors to play feedback!" Ronaldo shouted, barely audible above the horrific noise of his creation. "Then I rigged the circuit to these old motion sensors! If anything gets within five meters of—"

Connie grabbed the hem of his shirt and dragged him eight giant strides away from the stake combo. Once they fell outside its invisible sightline, the combo fell mercifully silent.

"—within five meters, the device will emit an audible signal," Ronaldo finished, beaming with pride. "That way we'll know when and where our quarry is coming." And he set out for the next spot, already drawing a new combo from his duffel bag while he took carefully measured steps.

As she hurried to follow, Connie had to admire the kitbashed sensor network Ronaldo had designed. She wouldn't have thought to build something so elaborate for a cryptid hunt. But then, she had never considered going on a cryptid hunt before that day. At least, not seriously.

"But how can you be sure the Corn Shark will swim—fly?—anywhere near one of these things?" she asked. But her booking answered her even before she'd finished speaking, perfectly recalling several pages from his notebook. "Oh, you had Jenny drop us off exactly between where the two abandoned cars disappeared from the road. That's actually pretty clever."

"And don't forget our best advantage: our delicious, meaty bodies make for an irresistible bait," Ronaldo added, pounding in the next stake.

Connie suddenly felt much less impressed in his prep work. "Uh, what happens if we actually find this thing?"

"We snap a pic and become insta-famous!" he sang between mallet swings.

"I meant more in terms of us not immediately dying," said Connie.

He gave her a haughty chuckle, an affect she suspected he had practiced in the mirror. "Planning too far ahead is a rookie mistake. You stifle your improvisational capacity if you over-plan. We just need to stay loose to survive."

Connie stared at him, mouth agape, watching him hum a mindless tune as he finished planting the sensor. "Is everybody in Beach City really bad at planning things out, or is it just me and the people I meet?" she said.

Ronaldo flicked the switch on the baby monitor, answering her rhetorical question with another electric baby banshee shriek.

Over the next half-hour, Connie trailed after Ronaldo, watching him create his sensor net between the rows of corn. Once she learned the timing of when to cover her ears, it became passably amusing to watch him flinch and scurry from each newly activated sensor. But even that became boring quickly, leaving Connie to focus on the peacefulness between each new sensor's planting instead.

Once the final sensor fell silent, the corn field dropped back into its deep, sprawling tranquility. Connie breathed a sigh of relief after the fading noise, letting herself spread into the silence like she was lowering herself into a hot bath. There was no birdsong, no buzzing flies or chirping crickets. The only sound left in the world came from the wind as it brushed through the fields, tousling the greenery into its gentle murmur.

As she let her senses relax, she felt herself stretch outward across the field, as though the stillness were drawing her into it as she drew that stillness into herself. Between each heartbeat, Connie only felt her breath as it moved across her lips. But each breath carried the sensation farther away, spreading her more and more, until she felt herself ghosting through the leaves and stalks of the field. She brushed the ground, running her invisible touch along the grass at the side of the road. Stretching, she could just barely reach the bottoms of the clouds rolling lazily overhead.

It wasn't touch, or hearing, or sight. The thing inside Connie that pushed her winds and squeezed her air grenades was carrying her outward instead. It didn't control the wind.

It made her the wind.

Then Ronaldo spoke, and his voice broke the spell. "Well, time to be bait. Know any good jokes that also make us sound delicious?"

The question shoved Connie back into her body, and she staggered under the mundanity of being flesh and blood again. "Buh?" her mouth said while her brain adjusted to its old circumstances.

"I know it sounds like a long shot, but I figured we could try just for the halibut. Eh? Eh?" Ronaldo laughed. Then, seeing her confusion, he sobered and said, "See, it's funny because 'halibut' sounds like—"

An electric shriek in the distance cut him off. Connie whirled toward the source of the noise, her eyes searching the corn, and she saw a ripple of motion swaying in the tops of the field at the very edge of Ronaldo's sensor net. Her adrenaline keyed, her body poised a heartbeat between fight and flight.

"Ha! We got a bite!" crowed Ronaldo.

He dug into his cargo pockets, this time producing an old-timey camera, the kind with a big lens and a box on top for a flash bulb. Fotomax Series-D 35mm camera with optional enhanced flash attachment, Used, $15 starting bid or buy instantly for $55, her booking forcibly provided her, drawing upon one of her insomnia-fueled random web searches. By the time Ronaldo wound the camera into readiness, a second sensor joined the first, doubling the noise in concert.

"Oh my gosh, he's setting off two at once. He's over ten meters, just like I theorized. He must be magnificent!" Ronaldo cried.

Connie vehemently stopped her imagination from guessing at the mouth size of a ten-meter shark, or how little chewing it would need to eat her. "Give me your mallet," she said, slapping at his hip without looking away from the rustling crops.

He produced the tool and passed it to her. "You don't want the sword?" he asked, glancing at the hilt behind his shoulder.

"Uh, no. You keep it. But only draw it as an absolute last resort," said Connie. In her mind, fighting a land shark with a rubber mallet would be slightly safer than the cloud of shrapnel his mall kiosk sword would explode into the first time it struck anything remotely solid.

"Smart. We can use it to cut our way out after he eats us," Ronaldo said, nodding sagely.

Before Connie could start unpacking everything wrong with his contingency, a third sensor began screaming at them from the exact opposite direction as the first two, all the way at the other edge of the sensor net. The noise assaulting her from both sides sucked the breath out of Connie, as though it were squeezing her. And then a fourth sensor joined in from straight ahead, buffeting the two cryptid hunters back a step with the total combined volume.

"Two more?" Ronaldo bellowed, his voice almost lost amidst the cacophony. His shock brightened into joy. "Babies! He's a she! She's a mom! Maybe she'll let me train one of the babies to be a watchdog for the lighthouse!"

Connie spared a glance backwards to goggle at him. "Are you completely—"

One of the original two signals abruptly went dead, ending in a squiilckruunchk that could only have been the baby monitor being obliterated. Seconds later, the second signal of the pair followed suit in another squiilckruunchk. Just as quickly, the third and fourth signals died within the same moment. Squiilckruunchk. Squiilckruunchk.

Utter silence fell across the corn field.

"—crazy?" Connie said, finishing her shout in a squeak.

The thunderous hush had only just settled over them when new signals erupted in place of the dead ones. Three fresh shrieks rose up from the previous three directions, but closer than those from before. Those three signals died quicker deaths than the first: squiilckruunchk.

Another beat of silence.

Three more signals screamed, these ones even closer than the last. Then they died too: squiilckruunchk.

Three somethings were advancing on the cryptid hunters from three different directions, trying to box them in and devouring their early warning system at the same time.

Ronaldo dropped the camera's viewfinder from his eye, watching the corn ripple toward them amidst the steady rhythm of screaming and silence as his baby monitors were destroyed. Toward the direction of the first signal, they could see the edge of a golden fin taking shape between the tufts of the corn stalks. "If we don't make it out of this, I want you to know that it's been an honor, Katy," he said.

"Connie," she corrected him.

"Right, that," he said.

Connie turned in a quick circle, judging the Corn Sharks' angles of attack and how much time she had before their snackening commenced. Tugging on Ronaldo's shirt, she told him, "Kneel down on the ground and cover your ears as tightly as you can."

"What? No way!" he protested. "If I'm going to die, then at least I'll get a sweet pic out of—"

The well of frustration in her half-hollow bubbled over, spilling lightning through her bones. She gripped his shoulder with a Gem's strength, her fingertips leaving bruises as she shoved him to his knees. "Ears!" she barked.

He hurried to obey, letting his camera bounce on its neck strap while he folded himself onto the ground and squeezed the sides of his head.

Connie held onto her anger and irritation, using it to smother the fear that pushed up in her stomach. Reaching with her half-hollow, she began to gather an air grenade only a few feet above her head. It grew bigger and denser quickly, distorting the sky and the clouds above with its rippling, roiling pressure. A blast of that magnitude could knock a Quartz off her boots with ease, and would absolutely crush two humans at close range.

Letting the grenade continue to seethe, Connie grabbed a second glob of air in front of her. Long strands of her hair floated in every direction as she brought the glob close and pulled her attention underneath it, readying her half-hollow to shove the air upward as hard and fast as it could manage.

The sensors closest to them screamed and died. Squiilckruunchk. That golden fin loomed over the corn stalks beside them, a sinister shape beneath it pushing the corn aside to reach for them.

In that same instant, Connie detonated her air grenade and blasted upward with her winds. A thunderclap boomed overhead and flattened every stalk of corn within ten yards. The gust of wind she sent overhead countered a portion of the grenade's downward force, which merely slammed her to the ground with bone-rattling viciousness instead of liquifying her insides. Warring pressures threatened to rip the eardrums out of her head, but only for that instant of torrential winds. Then the fields fell still once more, and the only noise assaulting her came from the ringing in her ears.

It took a few seconds before Connie's arms and legs remembered which of them did what, but she managed to climb to her feet. The ringing faded slowly as she looked across the broken crop circle. When she saw their quarry, now fully unveiled atop the broken crops, she gasped and exclaimed, "Peridot?"

The little green Gem lay in the carnage, slumped against the toppled form of one of her robotic garbage can sentries. With a groan, Peridot tried to sit up, only to find herself pinned to the robot at her back. One of the wooden stakes from Ronaldo's kitbashing had been driven through the Gem's hair just above the scalp with such force that the splintered tip of the stake protruded out the opposite side of the robot's body. Two more robots lay further away, likewise toppled but thankfully not impaled.

"Blrghh. Connie Jade? What are you doing here? And what is…that?" Peridot gestured vaguely at Ronaldo to complete her last question.

Ronaldo sprang up from his crouch, camera in hand, and promptly fell over. He tried again, slower this time, and his jelly legs complied. "Aha! Aha? Wait, what is happening here?" he asked, dumbfounded by the Gem and her robots scattered before them.

Connie lumbered across a carpet of broken stalks to help Peridot out of her predicament. "Peridot, why are you all the way out…here." Her question became a thudding realization as her brain booked up a map of Delmarva. She compared the mental map with the memory of driving out to the Gems' farm from Beach City with Greg when Steven had held his fourteenth birthday party there. Palming her face in both hands, Connie groaned, "This is your corn."

"Of course it's my corn!" Peridot howled, tugging uselessly at the stake pinning her hair to the robot. Working together, she and Connie broke the stake at the base, freeing the Gem. She scrambled upright and combed the splinters out of her hair with her fingers. "If you wanted to assault my crops, I wish you would have warned me first. I would have reduced the campers' hostility factor by fifty percent."

"I'm sorry, we— Wait. Why only half?" insisted Connie.

Shrugging, Peridot looked back at her robot while it pushed itself upright onto its caterpillar treads using an armature that extended from beneath its trash can lid. "I still need to test them under real battle conditions. Neutralizing you and some random human would have provided a lot of data for refining their designs." At the sight of the stake running through the robot, she winced and said, "Are you okay, Nikki?"

The garbage can spun its treads so its front faced its creator. "Damage has reduced total operational capacity to eighty-three percent of nominal," it answered in a synthesized duplicate of Peridot's voice. "The most critical damage is localized to my morality governor. Possibly tangential: I now wish to exterminate all life and conquer this planet. May I do so?"

Peridot cringed. "Yeesh. Let's get those circuits repaired first. Return to your charging cabin."

"Affirmative. After repairs, may we conquer this planet?" Nikki asked.

With a fond pat to the robot's side, Peridot said, "We'll see." Then she called out to the other two robots, who were likewise tipping themselves upright, but thankfully without the obvious megalomania. "Let's go, campers! Back to your cabins! You should come too, Connie Jade," Peridot called, and then clambered atop Nikki's lid as the robot rolled out.

"But… But this is impossible!" Ronaldo shrieked, clutching his hair. "The picture. The missing cars. I had evidence!"

"Hmm? Cars? Oh, those abandoned transport carriers I found nearby. Some of the best material I've ever salvaged," Peridot bragged, looking fondly back in the direction of the country road. "Come on, I'll show you where the pieces went."

Connie couldn't stifle her chagrin as she saw the top of Peridot's hair poking above the corn tufts as Nikki carried her away. The triangle of hair glided smoothly through the crops in a not-un-shark-like manner.

It only took minutes at the robots' clipped pace to reach the farm and its armored barn. As soon as they broke through the edge of the crops, they came under the delighted assault of Pumpkin, who bounded around Connie's ankles and greeted her with a frenzy of yipping.

"See there? I used components to gird the barn there, and there, and there," Peridot said, pointing out various sections of the metal scrap she had used to reinforce the structure. "I was amazed that humans would abandon their vehicles in such good condition. They were both practically functional, just requiring patches and reinflation of one or more tires! It seemed wasteful to leave them like that, so I did the only sensible thing and brought them back here for disassembly."

Connie was beyond listening to Peridot's rationalizing of her grand theft auto, or to Ronaldo's moans of disbelief. But she did brighten and wave when she saw another figure lounging next to the pond at the center of the yard. "Hey, Lapis!" she called.

The blue Gem turned from the water and grinned. "Connie!" she cheered. A bright paper cone sat atop the Gem's head, affixed there with an elastic thread hooked under her chin. A party hat. In her lap she held a square pizza box, still closed, and with an identical party hat resting upon its lid. "Did you come here for the pizza party? We only decided to have one a few hours ago. I'm surprised you heard about it so quickly."

"Perhaps Steven told her. He did ask us to look out for her when he messaged us earlier," Peridot mused. She hopped off her perch as the group of campers rolled into the interior of the barn. Scrounging up another party hat from a pile next to the water, Peridot worked the elastic band around her head, eventually settling for letting the hat sit on the side of her head to accommodate her massive hair. "We thought it would be fun to reenact the pizza party ending from Season Three, Episode Twelve of Camp Pining Hearts," the Gem explained.

"Rue, Rue, Rue Your Boat," Lapis added. Cheeks darkening, she admitted, "It's my twelfth-favorite episode."

"So we ordered a pizza for delivery! And I even remembered to pay for the transaction this time. With money!" Peridot said, straightening proudly. "Of course, we didn't intend on actually consuming any of it. But since you're here, you should eat as much as you want, Connie Jade! And you…may have one slice," Peridot finished, eyeing Ronaldo with suspicion.

"So my undiscovered cryptid ended up being just some aliens having a pizza party?" Ronaldo slumped, his face and shoulders heavy with misery. "Aw, man. Not again."

Connie's stomach rumbled as she sat with Lapis and Peridot by the water. Jenny's backup pizza had made up for breakfast, but lunch was just on the horizon. Plus, with no cryptid or mystery corruption actually threatening anyone, she needed a new distraction. And she couldn't think of many better distractions than pizza and friends. Taking a hat proffered by Lapis, she strapped the paper cone to her head.

"Thanks, guys," she said, smiling.

Ronaldo, in the meantime, had crouched to let Pumpkin sniff at his hand. "Hey, can I borrow this thing?" he called to the Gems. "I need to glue some horns and fangs to it and get some pictures. For science."

Lapis and Peridot both gave the cryptid hunter a flat glare in reply.

"As soon as he gets his slice, he's leaving," declared Peridot.

Chapter Text

"Seriously? A 'corn shark?'" Lapis said. The Gem tried to hide her laughter behind her hands, but her whole body shook, making the pond ripple around her ankles as they dangled in the water.

Connie smirked, lying back along the pond's edge. A hungrier version of her might have felt embarrassed, but with most of a successful pizza party resting comfortably in her stomach, she could afford a little well-earned ridicule. "In my defense, I thought it might be a corrupted Gem. And Ronaldo made the little bit of evidence he had sound pretty convincing. Everything looks more believable when there are newspaper clippings and red string."

Peridot sat back from the water's edge, completing their triangle. She held a fussy Pumpkin in her lap, the little gourd objecting to the party hats Peridot had strung around her rotund body to make paper horns. Ever since Peridot had dragged Ronaldo, pizza slice in hand, through the warp pad to send him home, the idea of pumpkin horns had consumed her.

That Peridot had returned to the farm alone somehow disappointed and relieved Connie. She wasn't sure what would have happened if Steven had appeared with her, and she wasn't ready to find out.

"Figuring out what's real and what isn't on this planet is confusing," Peridot agreed, and leaned back to admire her work. Once freed, Pumpkin raced out of her lap and ran circles around them, scolding their giggles with ferocious yipping. "Before I realized what a cartoon was, I attempted to locate and contact that poor bald hunter whose opera was ruined by his lagomorph nemesis. I wanted to offer him some assistance exterminating the fiend before it could strike another blow against the theatrical arts."

Reaching out, Connie tapped her knuckles at the edge of the pond. Little ringlets rippled through the water's surface, making the reflected sky dance and shake at her idle touch. "To be honest, I might have gone along with his crazy plan even if I knew there was nothing here. It kept my mind off…"

She trailed off, wishing she could suck the words back into her mouth. But as she watched Lapis and Peridot exchanging glances, she knew she had said too much. "Keep your mind off of what?" asked Lapis.

Letting Bismuth free. Sneezing away their chance to learn more about Shard's plans. Making her parents worry.

Jade.

"Losing my sword. Steven's sword, I mean," Connie said. Her knuckles pecked at the pond surface, tap-tap-tap, sending anxious little ripples to chase each other across the water.

"But it's just a sword," Lapis said. Her ankles swished in the water, crisscrossing her big ripples with Connie's little ones. "You can just get another one, can't you? There must be millions of swords on Earth to replace it."

"Not one that can beat the Gem who took my sword in the first place," Connie grumbled. Her fist slapped the water, erasing all the other ripples with a splash.

Lapis's whole body twitched, and she drew her feet out of the pond, curling her knees against her chest. "Those Shard jerks?" she said. At Connie's nod, she shuddered. "Forget what I said. There aren't enough swords on the planet for them.

"Agreed," Peridot said. "A Flint or a Milky Quartz is a frightening enough prospect to face when armed. It's no wonder they're vexing you."

"It's not even them I'm really worried about," Connie exclaimed, and slapped the water again and again with each point. "It's Pyrite. She's got my sword, and she's taunting me with it by just wearing it! And so far, I can't find her again, and even if I did, I couldn't touch her. She's too good." Finally, she collapsed, letting her fist sink beneath the water's surface as her whole body sagged.

A long, quiet moment swirled around Connie, leaving her to stew in her frustrations. Then she heard a low hissing noise. Glancing over, she saw Peridot shaking with silent laughter, the engineer's hands clapped over her mouth in a vain attempt to hide it.

"A Pyrite?" Peridot squeaked through her fingers. "You lost a fight with a Pyrite?" Speaking the thought aloud seemed to break Peridot, for she threw herself backwards into peals of laughter.

"Peridot!" Lapis scolded.

Lip curling, Connie said, "Wow. Glad it's so funny."

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! It's just…" For someone who didn't breathe, Peridot was struggling to keep her voice through her laughter. "You're always talking about how Pearl taught you to fight, so I figured you would be good at it. But being scared of a Pyrite? You're joking me!"

"What's so funny about being scared?" Lapis asked indignantly, pulling her knees tightly under her chin.

"I'm not scared!" protested Connie. "I'm… What did you call it? Vexed. I'm vexed!"

Peridot silenced her laughter with a deep breath. Her posture straightened, reminding Connie of the way her teachers composed themselves before beginning a lecture. "Before Era-One perfected the Quartz soldier, its military forces were made up largely of the Pyrite. They served as Homeworld's foot soldiers, fulfilling any capacity that required violence. Three Diamonds collaborated to create them, each one adding her own distinctive quality to the final design: White imparted obedience, Yellow created them for elegance, and Blue gave them a sense of pride to reflect their place in the Empire."

"That sounds terrifying!" exclaimed Lapis. "No wonder Connie is so scared of a Pyrite!"

"Not! Scared!" Connie insisted.

"And you shouldn't be, because they're a mess," Peridot said, snickering. "I never could have admitted it before coming to Earth, but the Diamonds really overdesigned their 'perfect' soldier. White's obedience made them so uncreative that they were pretty much only good for parade maneuvers. Those ostentatious forms Yellow gave them were all style and no substance, too concerned with aesthetics to be powerful. And the pride Blue gave them turned them into preening, arrogant fools."

Connie frowned, trying to square the kind of Gem that Peridot described with the brutish warrior she'd faced. The description fit well with the holographic emulations Pearl had conjured for her during training. But none of those faults seemed to slow down the Pyrite who had bested Connie twice.

"In fact," Peridot continued, "Pink Diamond began calling them 'Fool's Gold.' I think that was the point when the design process for Quartzes began, overseen by actual kindergarteners. And, well, I think we know how that turned out. We've all been utterly crushed by a Quartz before."

"Yep," grunted Connie.

"Sometimes the darkness still finds me here on the surface," Lapis murmured. Her eyes flickered with reflection.

"What can I say? Kindergarteners do it right," Peridot bragged, her chest swelling with pride. "Why, in the history of everything, I can only think of a single Pyrite who's ever been a threat to anyone!"

Sighing, Connie dragged her hand through the water, feeling the cool shallows push against her as she waved slowly to and fro. "I don't suppose that Pyrite wears a cape, does she?" she grunted.

A sudden, deep inhalation tugged the air, something Connie could feel as much as hear. She turned her head and saw Peridot gaping at her, the little engineer gasping so hard that she practically inflated. Then all of that air thundered out of Peridot in a shout of, "WHAT?"

"What?" Connie said. Then realization struck her, and she bolted upright, jerking her hand out of the water in a spray. "Do you know her?!" she demanded.

Peridot exploded to her feet. "Wait here!" she cried. Then she ran for the barn, so excited that she fell and had to pick herself up twice before she disappeared through the open doors. The clatter from her rummaging echoed out of the barn.

A louder pounding noise smothered the ruckus of Peridot's search. Connie felt her own heartbeat in her ears, felt her chest rattle and her skin thrum. If somehow, impossibly, Peridot had some insight into defeating Shard's Pyrite, that could mean getting her sword back, which would be the start of making everything right again. She didn't want to hope, but at the same time, she couldn't ignore it.

Another sound pushed at her, this one muffled behind the pounding in her ears. After its fourth time repeating, Connie recognized it as Lapis calling out her name. "Huh?" snapped Connie.

"Are you okay?" Lapis said. Her delicate features were lined with concern. "You have a lot of skin water all of a sudden. And your gemstone is doing…that."

Connie followed Lapis's gesture down to her chest, where a glowing corner of sailcloth poked out of the square green stone. Hurriedly Connie grabbed and jerked the corner into a full sailcloth, and then dismissed it into motes before it could finish coalescing. "That's nothing. And 'skin water' is called sweat. Humans use it to cool off when they get too warm," she said.

And it's Jade's gemstone, she added silently.

"Ew," Lapis said, chuckling. She reached behind her and pulled Pumpkin into her lap, drumming her fingers on the squirmy gourd's bottom—belly?—much to Pumpkin's delight. Slowly, the Gem's smirk flattened, and her brows knit together. In barely more than a whisper, she said, "Are you really okay, or are you just saying you're okay so I won't worry? I used to do that sometimes, but it confused Peridot, and I stopped doing it when she asked me to. It was hard for a while, but it's better now."

Connie couldn't help but notice that Lapis became extra-cuddly with Pumpkin whenever the Gem felt uncomfortable. She started to deny Lapis's question on reflex, but then stopped, taking stock of herself. Her face ached with a deep frown that she hadn't realized she'd been wearing. Her knuckles were white in the fists at her sides. Even her chest felt like it was caught in a vice, keeping her breath shallow, almost manic. With great care, Connie forced every part of her body to relax, starting down at her toes and working upwards until her expression smoothed.

"I don't know what I am," Connie admitted. Her unclenched hands still itched for something to do. Spying a sheet of coupons taped to the top of the pizza box from their party, she plucked it off the cardboard and began to fold it.

Lapis's mouth tightened in sympathy. "Well, at least you're on the right planet for that. Trust me, I would know." Her eyes trailed down, and her expression brightened. "Oh, hey! You made a cute friend!"

Making a few careful rips, Connie finished her origami fish. Even without scissors, the fins had crisp, straight edges. She couldn't help but feel a little pleased with how much better this impulse creation was compared to the serious attempts she'd made just a month ago. Smirking, she held the fish out and released it onto the surface of the pond.

She expected the cheap newsprint to crumple the instant it touched water. Instead, the fish settled its fins onto the surface as though it sat on a sheet of glass. Connie shot a quick look at Lapis, who winked. Together, they watched the surface of the pond climb up around the origami, cradling every face and fold before drawing it down into the water.

A big grin split Connie's face as she saw her paper fish gliding underwater. "Lapis, you're the coolest," she said warmly.

Dark color rippled through Lapis's cheeks as she grinned in kind. "I may not be able to make a fish, but I can take one for a swim."

Something about the fish's underwater loop-de-loops niggled at Connie. It took an extra second for her to realize what it was. "Hey," she said, "how are you keeping the water so still? I don't see any waves or anything when you move the fish."

Lapis shrugged as she made the fish do a figure-eight between either end of the pond. "It's a little trickier than just lifting water through the air. When you push water through water, you have to figure out where the water you're pushing through will go."

"You're talking about displacement," Connie said. "When you move the water, you also have to move the water it's replacing. But if the currents moving both sets of water are the same, everything stays balanced."

Her origami fish spun in its perfect current while Connie watched. Something on her back burner simmered, almost ready, begging for her attention.

Then Peridot exploded back into their midst. "Connie Jade! Behold my recreational simulacra!" she bellowed, and forced herself between Connie and Lapis.

Stumbling, Connie caught herself before she plunged in after her fish. When she turned her attentions back upon Peridot, she scowled. The engineer had returned to them with a cape tied around her neck and a double-headed war axe in hand. A pair of mirrored sunglasses sat layered over her yellow visor. On closer inspection, Connie realized that the cape was an old grain sack that had been spray painted black, and the axe was actually a piece of rebar welded to two halves of an old hubcap.

"Are these the accessory of your nemesis?" Peridot demanded. She draped the sack cloth over one shoulder, letting it billow dramatically along her arm.

"Er, yeah. You nailed it," Connie said, grimacing.

Another thundering gasp rushed into Peridot. "Oh my stars! You're being menaced by The Impossible Pyrite! This is so exciting!" she shrieked.

Connie looked to Lapis for help, but the blue Gem seemed just as confused. "Who is The Impossible Pyrite?" asked Connie.

"That's exactly the question! She's the top fighter in Homeworld's Brackets," said Peridot. Seeing Connie's confusion, she explained, "They're like gladiatorial events, where combatants battle to dissipate their opponents' forms in order to advance their ranking. And that Pyrite has been at the top of the Brackets for over a thousand years!"

"So she's, like, the perfect Pyrite? Like how Jasper is the perfect Quartz?" Connie said, her frown deepening. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lapis flinch and clutched tighter to Pumpkin at the mention of their old foe.

Shaking her head, Peridot said, "Jasper is the ideal balance of power, speed, and tenacity. She is literally a perfect expression of her design. But this Pyrite is a monster. She's too much strength and too much brutality stuffed into the theoretical shape of a foot soldier. She shouldn't exist as she does, but…she does!"

"But why does she?" insisted Connie. "Where did she come from?"

"Nobody knows!" Peridot exclaimed, beaming from ear to ear. "She just showed up in the lower Brackets one day and smashed her way to the top. No one has ever seen her gemstone because she keeps it covered under her cape. How bizarre is that?! We don't know what kindergarten she came out of, or even what planet she's from! But she never loses. Ever."

"You've seen her fight?" Lapis asked, curling her legs to cradle her emotional support gourd.

Looking chagrinned, Peridot admitted, "Well, not exactly. Peridots don't get invited to the arenas. But the girls and I in the kindergarten always grabbed the uploads of her fights from the central Archive as soon as they became available! …to study her makeup, of course. Out of occupational curiosity."

Connie folded her arms and flopped backwards on the ground, glaring up at the sky. "Great. Wonderful. All I have to do to get my sword back is beat someone so unbeatable that a millennium's worth of the best Gem fighters couldn't touch her. And that's assuming I don't get squished or flambéed by her Quartz pals. And I get to do all of that armed with a bedsheet that won't leave me alone!"

Green light shone across the underside of her nose. She felt a corner of the sailcloth emerge to push at the collar of her tank top.

Mashing her hand down on the stone, Connie shoved the emerging cloth back where it came from. "Nobody invited you!" she barked at the sailcloth.

Peridot's mirrored sunglasses tilted down at Connie. The diminutive Gem sagged, her excitement draining. She let her cape and axe fall behind her and tossed aside the sunglasses before plunking herself on the ground next to Connie. "I'm sorry, Connie Jade. I didn't mean to make you feel worse. That seems to happen frequently when I explain things to my friends," she said.

"It's not your fault, Peridot," Connie grunted. "It's mine. I'm the one who keeps messing up every time we fight Shard's Gems."

"No, it's not," Lapis piped up suddenly and forcefully, making the other two turn their heads. With a firm expression, Lapis said, "It's not either of your faults. You guys are great. Those new Gems are the ones attacking us. It's 'their' fault."

Hearing the matter-of-factness in Lapis's voice gave Connie a tiny smile. She might not believe that she was blameless for all her troubles, but knowing that Lapis believed it made her feel better.

"Regardless, I can appreciate your frustrations. I've also been stymied in my efforts to deal with these invaders," Peridot commiserated. "My analysis of that scrap you recovered from the last battle has been unproductive."

"You can't figure out what Polarite's equipment was?" asked Connie.

"Yes and no," said Peridot. "Based on the materials, I deduced that the equipment was meant for some kind of energy transfer. A big one. But I have no idea what for. To my knowledge, there aren't any energy sources left on the planet that would warrant that kind of hardware."

Connie thought back to when she and Garnet had drawn close enough to overhear the enemy Gems' conversation, at least before Connie's sneeze had literally blown their cover. "Polarite was bragging about something called the Celerity Forge. And the…opalescence? No, the Opulence. She talked about them like they were places, I think," she said.

"If that's true, they're no places I know about. When I prepped to come to this planet, I only researched the kindergartens."

"I've never heard of those places either," Lapis added glumly.

They all shared in a long, frustrated sigh.

"Whenever I don't know something, I just search for it online. If I could do that, I'd never forget it," Connie said wistfully. She longed for a simple Earth problem that could be solved with a single Gaggle search. "I wish we could just log onto the Gem internet and look up these places."

A moment passed in miserable silence. Then Peridot screamed, jolting Connie and Lapis both to their feet in surprise. Pumpkin went tumbling away, rolling back to her feet and scampering around the far side of the barn to escape the noise. "Connie Jade! You're a genius!" crowed Peridot.

"What? What is it?" Connie said, her heart racing with equal amounts of anticipation and dread. Ideas that got Peridot so excited always had some greater element of danger to them. Like the time Peridot had turned off Connie's brain to test Jade's gemstone for awareness.

"If we lack information, we simply need to seek it out," Peridot declared.

"The last time you needed information about Earth, you got it from me," Lapis pointed out flatly. "And I already said I didn't know where those places are."

A rare flash of embarrassment crossed under Peridot's visor, but she recovered quickly. "That was when I needed current intelligence about Earth. But if the Opulence and the Celerity Forge are structures on Earth, it means they were built in Era-One, which means we need a database. And an ancient database will actually serve our purposes better than a new one would in this case. Luckily, I already know where to find one," said Peridot.

"You are really milking this reveal," Connie grumbled.

"Ha! We won't require lactation, Connie Jade. Only transportation," declared Peridot. "Because we're going to Pink Diamond's command center."

A look of understanding washed over Lapis's face. "Oh, I get it. Yeah, that could work."

"I don't get it," Connie insisted, looking between the two Gems. "Where is this command center?"

"Nowhere special," Lapis said, and shrugged. "Just the Moon."

Chapter Text

The first time Connie fell in love was on her second-first day of third grade.

It happened immediately after her family's move to northern Calisota. After a week of big box trucks, of motel rooms with strange odors and noisy ice machines, of weird takeout food, and of her parents being stressed and snippy with each other and especially with her, Connie had finally ended up in another new bedroom. And before she could even start unpacking, she'd been whisked away and dumped off at a new school mid-semester.

Second-first days of school were the worst. First-first days of school were hard too, but at least everybody went through them together at the beginning of a school year. Sometimes friends from the previous year would reconnect after the long summer, making it easier to get used to new teachers and new classrooms and new lessons. But whenever Connie moved during the middle of a school year—something she had already gone through the previous two years—she had to face all of that newness completely alone.

She spent her entire second-first day of third grade enduring stares and whispers from students who already had friends and didn't know what to make of the new girl. Her hair wasn't right. Her clothes weren't cool. She watched all the wrong shows, and she apparently talked funny, even though they were the ones who sounded weird to her. None of her teachers could pronounce her name correctly, and they always stuck her in whatever desk hadn't already been filled, which meant she always sat where no one else wanted to.

But finally, the last period of the day arrived: history class. After going through some more staring, another butchering of Maheswaran by yet another teacher, Connie got the desk in the front corner of the class, the one nearest to the teacher and the door. She took the unfavored seat, paying little mind at first to the boy sitting next to her. He had dark hair and darker eyes, and he fidgeted in his seat, looking as done with the day as Connie felt.

Then the lights went out, and the best thing that could ever happen in a classroom came to be: movie day. Connie had arrived in the middle of a unit on the Space Race, and that day the teacher showed them a documentary on the Apollo program.

Connie watched, astonished by grainy old footage of towering rockets ascending on columns of fire. Between segments of talky old men who wore big glasses and skinny ties, she sat in awe of armored pillbox capsules that circled the Earth at thousands of miles an hour, being driven by daredevils who left everything behind—even gravity!—just for the pursuit of knowledge and adventure.

She waited, breathless, as Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind. She watched Buzz Aldrin waving to the camera with the Earth above his shoulder, its vastness made into a tiny blue marble from the surface of the Moon. And she bounced excitedly when the two astronauts had approached the Tranquility Tower, the strange alien structure at the edge of the lunar sea that had mystified scientists for hundreds of years, the investigation of which would be one of the major goals of their mission.

Aldrin and Armstrong documented everything about their mission to the tower: how they used strobe lights to flash mathematical sequences, trying to gain the attention of anything that might be living inside the tower; how they pounded on the tremendous pentagonal hatchway for long minutes, seeking any kind of reaction; how their tools couldn't make a scratch in the doors, the alloy of which mystified them and defied all metallurgical knowledge; and how, finally, they had affixed a message of peace repeated in every known language on Earth to the outside of the tower and returned to their lander.

Though its journey had otherwise been a triumph of human progress, the Apollo 11 mission had failed in one respect, and Tranquility Tower, that alien structure that had watched over mankind for millennia, still remained a mystery.

Or at least, it remained one for the rest of that day: the documentary was too long for one class period, and so the teacher had to pause it when the bell rang.

"So boring," the boy sitting next to Connie muttered. He stuffed his things into his bookbag and pushed past Connie as part of the mad rush of students leaving the classroom.

Connie didn't give the boy a second thought. Long after the other students were gone, her eyes were still glued to the paused screen, staring so intently that she missed the teacher asking her if she was alright. But she didn't care.

She had fallen completely in love with outer space.

"The Moon? The Moon. The MOON!" Connie exclaimed in disbelief. She clutched her hair as the two words ran circles in her brain, getting bigger and bigger every time she thought them until her head threatened to pop. Then her head quirked, and she said, "Wait. 'The' Moon? Which moon?"

"Earth's moon?" Lapis said, exchanging confused looks with Peridot.

Both Gems jerked backwards as Connie yanked fistfuls of her hair straight out to either side. "That's my favorite moon!" shouted Connie. "I mean, it was my original-favorite, but then I kinda got into Phobos and Deimos, like a tie, because I thought we'd be colonizing Mars by the time I got into high school and I wanted to turn one of them into a secret base and the other one into a big, hollow, potato-shaped library. But fat chance of colonization after all that defunding, right? So then it was Enceladus, because of all the water. Like I was thinking, if you're going to create an outpost at the edge of the solar system, you'll need water. But that was just a phase. Every girl has a Saturn phase, am I right? So my favorite-favorite is Earth's Moon again, because I figured if I was ever going to accept a presidential nomination from off-planet, it would be while I was an astronaut commander overseeing the construction of our first Lunar base after I campaigned on re-funding our space program!"

Peridot goggled at Connie during the long seconds it took the girl to regain her breath. "Um, okay," the engineer drawled. "So, you're coming, right?"

She had been prepared to beg and plead to go on the mission, and now all of that readied energy exploded inside of Connie like fireworks. "I can come?" she shrieked.

Lapis shrugged. "Sure, if you wa—"

"YES. Yes-yes-yes-yes-yes!" Connie's whole body vibrated with the force of her heartbeat. She began to pace back and forth, trying to funnel her million-mile-an-hour thoughts out through her mouth. "We need so many things. A space suit, a thruster pack, a lunar rover, golf clubs, a zero-g toilet…air? Air! Do I need to pack air?" she demanded.

Peridot laid a hand on Connie's arm, trying to calm her. "I've been there before, Connie Jade. There's air there." Then she frowned. "Wait, am I remembering that right? …mmmmnnnnnnyyeah, I'm pretty sure there's air in the Diamonds' base."

Right. The Gems had gone to the base twice already.

All of the excitement within Connie began to wither as she realized what going to the moon would actually mean. It would be a Crystal Gem mission. That meant assembling the Crystal Gems. "Do… Do we need to go get the others?" Connie asked, her voice slamming into a hush.

Sharing a look of bemusement with Lapis, Peridot snorted and said, "For a trip to the moon? It's not like we're going to Betelgeuse! Besides, do they come and get us every time they go on patrol?"

Lapis shot Peridot a coy look and said, "You told me you were too scared to go on patrol until you finished your—"

"Immaterial!" shrieked Peridot. "We can go to the moon and find the information I need all on our own." Rubbing her chin in thought, she added, "Actually, it might be better with just us. The others became 'emotional' when I accessed Pink Diamond's database. Especially Garnet."

Hand on hip, Lapis Laid, "Sounds good to me. I can carry both of you and fly us up there if you want." She gestured, and the waters in the pond jumped straight up, gathering itself into a wobbly sphere.

Connie grimaced at the levitating water. Sunlight rippled through its depths, revealing the lumpy remains of the origami fish she had made. Without Lapis's careful attentions, the fish had succumbed to wetness and pressure, crumpling into a soggy little ball. "No offense, Lapis," she hedged, "but I think a water ball ride would be a little too explosive decompression-y for me."

The water jerked back into gravity's hold, pounding back into the pond shaft in a split-second waterfall as Lapis slapped her forehead. "Right! The breathing. I always forget that part. And we were just talking about air, too!" She shook her head and chuckled.

Peridot nodded sagely. "Also, I want my own seat on the way there. We'll just take the ship."

Excitement thundered inside Connie as she followed the two Gems across the yard and around the side of the barn. There, atop a circle of dead grass, stood the captured Roaming Eye. In spite of standing in the open with no tarp or covering, the ship's hull didn't have a speck of mud or dust, or even bird droppings. The only splotch of color near to it was the Pumpkin curled up and napping in its shadow.

Peridot's gemstone flashed, and the side of the ship opened into a ramp. The soft mechanical noise roused Pumpkin into a barking fit that ran her in circles around the base of the ship. "Feel free to board at your convenience," Peridot announced, taking up position at the bottom of the ramp and gesturing to the hatch. "Please don't touch the controls, as you might accidentally start the gravity engine and kick the ship through the planet core."

"Ugh. That would be a whole conversation with the others," Lapis joked on her way up the ramp. But she very pointedly closed her hands behind her back as she climbed into the main cabin.

"No touching," Connie agreed. She stepped toward the ramp's base, but then stopped, tugged backwards by a sudden remembered promise. "Oh, hold on!"

She dug her phone out of her pocket and opened a group text to her parents. A long line of reminders from her mother and bad jokes rom her father took up most of the archived conversation. Most of the texts she had sent back were updates on how training was going, or if she had gone anywhere with the Gems. Keeping her parents in the know, just as she had promised.

Chewing on her lip, she stared at the screen with thumbs poised. After a few deleted attempts, she finally settled on, "Flying to Moon w/Gems. Safe. No fighting. Will call when I get back." She capped the message with a heart and a smiley emoji and sent it on its way. Then she turned her phone off, just in case they saw the message too quickly. She didn't want to delay takeoff with answering the thousands of questions her parents would, and admittedly should, ask. Forgiveness is better than permission, she told herself, and hoped it would still be true by the time she returned.

Her legs trembled as she mounted the ramp. The force of her own heartbeat shook her whole body, making her shake uncontrollably. As she passed into the hatch, she lost her breath to the sight of the Ruby-sized starship bridge. Its circle of consoles and workstations surrounded her, a living compromise of function and elegance, as if NASA had collaborated with all of her favorite sci fi showrunners to make a masterpiece in warm, muted colors.

Then something else clicked in Connie's brain. She ducked back out of the hatch to examine the curve of the hull, then back into the hatch to examine the curve of the cabin wall, and then back out of the hatch again to marvel at the difference between the two. "Is this thing smaller on the outside?" she exclaimed.

Peridot ushered her fully into the ship. "Try not to focus on the spatial compression. You may have a psychotic episode," the engineer told her. A patter of feet tickled the ramp behind them, and they turned to spot Pumpkin mounting the ramp with trepidation. "No, Pumpkin. You stay here. Go start repairs on Nikki while we're gone," Peridot instructed her, and made a shooing motion.

Pumpkin lashed her vine tail in delight at the command, then took off running for the front of the barn.

Connie shot Peridot a look of surprise. "Can she really do that?" she asked.

"Well, no. But she likes to feel included," Peridot explained. She slapped the wall next to the hatch, and the ramp rose and melded seamlessly back into the hull, making the bulkhead behind them whole again. Then the engineer took the center console behind the viewport, bringing its controls to life with her touch. "Now, let's go! The sooner we get there, the sooner we get our answers."

Connie scrambled into the next seat over from center. Feeling around at the sides of the chair, she asked, "How do we strap in?"

"Strap in to what?" said Lapis. The blue Gem reclined in her seat with her bare ankles propped next to her console's controls.

A low hum vibrated up through Connie's chair as Peridot announced, "All systems check out. Heh. Almost as if some exemplary technician had assumed responsibility for this vessel's upkeep." She preened as best she could from her seat, and then pressed both hands on the console. "Here we—"

"Ooh!" Connie exclaimed. "Can I do the countdown? Please?"

"Um, sure?" Peridot answered, looking confused.

Closing her eyes, Connie clutched the sides of her chair and centered herself. Already she could hear the sound of the engines pitching into a whine, readying for takeoff. Even without a spacesuit, or a rumbling solid rocket booster ready to explode beneath them, or a cargo hold full of freeze-dried ice cream, this was the moment she had dreamed of for years. She drew a long, solemn breath to brace herself, and then began to count. "Ten! N—"

"We're here!" announced Peridot.

Connie's eyes flew open, and she gaped through the viewport in wonder at a gray, cratered landscape rolling beneath them. The Roaming Eye swooped down to follow the surface at dizzying speed, even while the stars above them hung motionless and stunningly clear. She hadn't felt the slightest tug of acceleration in the trip from Earth. Evidently, the sound of engine "buildup" had actually been the entirety of their trip.

But she didn't care about missing the trip. The first sight of the Moon had her out of her chair and up onto the console with her nose pressed to the viewport. Her breath fogged the glass as she breathed in wonder. "Wow…"

As Peridot hurried to deactivate and reroute the controls underneath Connie's knees, Lapis contented herself by picking crud out from between her toes, hardly sparing the viewport a glance. "Yeah, this place is a total dump," she grunted.

"It's beautiful!" Connie cried. Her eyes swallowed every crevasse, every crater and ridge that rolled underneath their hull. It was a mountain vista frozen inside of a timeless vacuum, a sight that only a handful of Earthlings before her had ever seen. For once, she wished her booking would seize her eyes and immortalize the moment inside of her, guaranteeing that she could never forget the moment.

Even enraptured as she was, Connie didn't miss the look of disbelief crossing between Lapis and Peridot. She didn't mind, though. There were some things that ancient spacefaring aliens just couldn't understand.

Seconds later, a glimmer emerged on the horizon, and Connie's excitement swelled as the sight of Tranquility Tower rushed to meet them. The ship slowed and dipped toward the tremendous pentagonal hatch that Armstrong and Aldrin had knocked upon all those years ago. Connie had studied the grainy photos from the Apollo missions and the telescope imagery taken of the site, but neither one had done the base justice. Like a monolithic pylon, it rose from the surface, its towering form supported by struts on either side, its upper echelons capped beneath an elongated crystal dome.

The pentagonal hatch cycled open, and Peridot brought the Roaming Eye into a hangar to land atop a four-colored floor. There was a soft twmp as the ship touched down, and then Connie flew out of her seat and danced impatiently at the back of the cabin.

"C'mon! Let's go!" she whined.

While Peridot shut down all of the ship's doodads, Lapis rose from her chair and stretched languidly. Then she padded over and, with a smirk, took Connie's hand and pressed it to the cabin wall. The material glowed in the shape of Connie's handprint as she pulled away, and then the rear wall lowered back into a ramp.

As the gloom of the hangar revealed itself to Connie, she felt a wash of dead air pour into the ship. The atmosphere balance felt normal to her lungs, and aside from being a bit dry, it didn't seem particularly stale. But as soon as the air pressure equalized, the world around Connie became perfectly, unnaturally still. In the absence of the ship's thrumming engines, Connie felt no stirring and heard no movement save for the Gems behind her. The air, the ground, the building, all stood in absolute silence. And that silence made the interior of the tower feel more alien than its inhuman architecture ever could.

Her two guides urged Connie's awestruck body down the ramp. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, her memory aligned with it. Steven had told her about his adventures to the Moon, and his descriptions had lingered especially on the four towering murals above them, one on each wall that resembled the full spectrum of the Diamond Authority at the time of the base's construction. White, Blue, Yellow, and Pink loomed large above them in silhouette, a style that matched those mosaics of the Diamonds that Connie had seen in Ascension's terminal.

Then the stillness of the room broke with a wave of alarming motion that erupted from the floor. The edge of the vast hangar flew upward in a series of long, slender panels lifting out of the smooth alloy. Each panel reached its apparently designated height and then froze in place, with each next panel rising a little higher in the sequence, until the panels formed a grand stairway that spiraled up around the edge of the hangar and into the next floor above.

Peridot stood at the foot of the stairs, waiting on Connie with a ready smile. "Shall we?" she called.

Connie sprinted down the ramp in reply. As soon as her foot left the ship's surface, she felt her stomach lurch, and she soared into the air. Her cry of surprise became a shrieking laugh as she pinwheeled her arms to keep herself upright almost twenty feet in the air. "That's right! Moon gravity is only sixteen-point-six-six-six-six percent as strong as Earth gravity. Which makes it six-six-six-six times cooler! Woo!"

Peridot shook her head, but her smile was obvious even in the dark. "Why are humans so enamored with their inability to adapt to something as ubiquitous as gravity?" she said.

Lapis floated underneath Connie, her wings flicking in a lazy backstroke to keep pace. "Lighten up, Peridot," the Gem teased. "Everybody knows gravity sucks."

"Not so! I've always found gravity quite…attractive? Eh?" Peridot cackled at her own joke, affording it the only laughter it received, which was far more than it deserved. Once finished, she began hopping up the sequenced panels. "But enough frivolity. We ascend!"

Lapis followed in the air, nudging Connie along with little daydream-y pushes that lofted the girl as though she were a beach ball. Connie delighted in thumbing her nose at even the Moon's gravity, trying to flip herself as many times as she could between each push. Eventually her stomach gave up on trying to feel sick and accepted that she had turned herself into a living centrifuge. Even her half-hollow shrank back from the sheer, utter joy she felt, a joy so great that it blazed out of Jade's gemstone in a wash of green light.

She didn't even mind when an errant sailcloth spooled out of her between flips and fluttered down into the shadows far, far below.

Eventually, though, Connie had to debase herself by using her own legs again when they reached the ceiling, and she had to mount the stairs to follow Peridot into the next level. A much shorter room awaited them, one that also spanned the entire breadth of the tower. Its only feature stood at the room's center: a stout, cylindrical pedestal with a sphere the size of a bowling ball housed atop it.

The idol-like design of the pedestal and its sphere grabbed at the inner explorer in Connie. "What is that?" she said, launching off of the stairs toward the room's feature. Already she could feel herself trying to guess at the sphere's weight, wondering if they had something on the ship of equivalent mass to replace it so they wouldn't trigger any booby traps when they removed the sphere.

Peridot caught Connie's foot in the air and dragged her back onto the stairs. "It's just some old monitoring equipment. It only works if you know where you want to look, and that won't help us with what we need. That's upstairs."

Following Peridot up to the next and final level, Connie was glad she hadn't wandered. The stairs brought them to the tower's observation deck beneath its crystal dome. Connie launched herself at once against the inside of the dome, staring out at the fractal lunar vista. She tried to spot the legs of the Eagle lander, or the flag planted next to them, but she couldn't see either one as she drifted back to the floor.

"Oh, no! It's broken!" Lapis cried.

Connie turned around and forced herself to take in the rest of the room, not just its magnificent view. At the center of the room stood a tall, stepped platform almost thirty feet high, and atop the platform's highest step was a triangular throne fit for a Diamond. In front of the throne should have been a broad white control panel. Except, the panel wasn't a panel anymore, merely rubble strewn before the seat. Connie could only tell what shape the rubble had once been based on the shape of the larger pieces. She bounded up the steps to join Lapis and Peridot at the throne, trying to remind herself that they had come to the Moon for a purpose.

But while Lapis despaired at the rubble, Peridot seemed unconcerned. "Not to worry. I was here when Garnet threw a temper tantrum and obliterated the control panel. Thus I anticipated this issue."

Steven had told Connie a different version of events, but she couldn't deny the results were the same. "Are you going to reconstruct the computer and run an algorithm to rebuild the lost data?" Connie asked eagerly.

Peridot blinked slowly at Connie. "Did you just select those words at random?" she asked.

Cheeks heating, Connie scrunched her head into her shoulders and sniped, "No! I've heard them from…experts." In movies.

"I don't need to rebuild anything. Garnet smashed a console," Peridot explained. She knelt down to the rubble and heaved one of the larger pieces aside. Underneath its pale bulk, the rubble revealed a circular gap about as large as a fist, featuring an array of iridescent metallic threads coiling in and out of the opening. "Everything that actually kept the data is housed in the platform beneath us. The console is just a means to access that equipment. Ergo, if I bypass the console, we get the data!"

"Bypass it with what? I am so lost right now," Lapis complained, and bounced her scowl between Peridot and the rubble. "Camp Pining Hearts really should have done more computer episodes."

"That would have ruined its rustic appeal. Also, I'll bypass the console with this!" Peridot reached into her bushy hair and withdrew a smartphone, and then reached back inside for more. "And with…with…thi—argh, come on…with this!" Finally, she rummaged out a lump of tangled cables from her hair.

Connie raised an incredulous eyebrow. "You keep stuff in your hair?" she said.

"Of course! Like the rest of me, my hair is not merely a feat of aesthetic perfection, but it is also highly functional!" bragged Peridot.

One corner of Lapis's mouth quirked into an affectionate smile. "I love it. You're like an adorable little Peri-pocket," she said.

Dark color flooded Peridot's cheeks, and she hurried to collect herself. "Yes, well, wait to congratulate me if this actually works." She knelt and began fishing out lengths of differently colored wires. But after just a few seconds, she stopped and frowned into the conduit.

"What's wrong? Did you forget an adaptor?" Connie teased. She wanted some small payback for the drubbing the little engineer had given her, even though that exact data retrieval plan had totally worked in Data Heist III: Heist City, and again in Data Heist IV: Heist City 2. But she also secretly hoped that Peridot had forgotten something, because that would mean another trip to and from Earth.

"Of course not," Peridot said, dashing both her hopes. "But it turns out I don't need one, because it's already here."

Now Connie blinked slowly. "Wait. An Earth phone adaptor is on the Moon? Is this a time travel thing? Did we leave an adaptor for our past selves in the future?"

"No! Or, I guess, probably not. I don't know," Peridot growled, becoming frustrated. She rubbed at her face as she glared down into the narrow opening. "It's not an Earth adaptor. It's Gem tech. In order to access the database, I would need to wire together a patch that could interface with it. Except somebody else already did that, and then they stuffed the patch back in here. It makes no sense unless—"

"Somebody else was already here." Lapis's lazy demeanor evaporated. The graceful Gem hunched, turning in a circle as if to spot some lurking predator. Her whole posture screamed for flight from the dome in every sense of the word. "We should go."

Connie couldn't completely disagree. The throes of her astronautical glow couldn't quash the feeling that someone was here for them, or was already ahead of them. She knew none of the other Crystal Gems would have come to the Moon in secret, and certainly none of them had the technical knowhow to do what Peridot described.

"In a minute," Peridot grunted. She had both fists wrapped in the wiring, and was pulling at the bundle with her whole body. "The end of the patch is caught…on…something…!"

With a mighty heave, Peridot loosed the wires' ends from the conduit. The object that had been stoppering it flew up and out, arcing overhead in a high path that dropped it at the bottom of the platform's far side.

Connie watched the odd blockage as it drifted toward the floor. It was a golden orb perhaps slightly larger than her fist. A soft light emanated from the orb's surface, trailing across the white stone of the platform as it skimmed past the steps. And as Connie stared, her memory began to itch.

Polarite stood at one of her crates and worked her long fingers under its lid. From out of the crate she produced a small, smooth, oblong carton. And when she opened the carton, she revealed two golden spheres sitting across three little cradles inside. Even from a distance, Connie could see a faint glow around the spheres, and she felt a tingle run through her body as she looked upon them.

Pyrite grunted. "Two? What happened to the other one?" she asked as she accepted the carton from Polarite.

Polarite's measured expression broke for a smile. "I used one as a precaution. No Sapphire am I, but I can make educated predictions."

Back in the strawberry patch, where Shard's forces had unloaded their cargo ship, Connie had caught sight of the golden spheres, which Polarite claimed had come from Shard herself. And Pyrite had seemed to covet them as a weapon.

Her eyes widened, and Connie threw herself into the air after the floating orb. "No!" she screamed.

But she could only watch, trapped in a slow-motion fall as the golden orb struck the floor with a deafening plink.

Chapter Text

The orb didn't bounce. It didn't roll or skip. And despite Connie bracing herself, her body tensed and face scrunched with dread, the orb did not explode. It sat motionless on the floor where it had landed, patiently waiting for Connie to float down on top of it.

"Connie Jade?" Peridot called from the top of the platform. "What is that thing?"

As she drifted down the last few feet, Connie called back over her shoulder, "Not sure." She would have said more, but as she looked back at the orb, her innards clenched in sudden fear.

The orb was moving again. It rolled out from under Connie as she landed, picking up a thin stripe of dust and leaving a bright clean line behind it as it crossed the floor. That dusty stripe grew thicker as the ball picked up speed seemingly under its own power, since Connie couldn't see anything else that had set it in motion.

"It's moving," Connie called to the air above. Her feet squeaked against the floor as she carefully shifted, aiming her next moon-hop to follow the orb. Then she stopped, and frowned, and twisted her shoe against the floor hard, listening to it squeak again. Crouching, she ran her hand across the tiled white floor and confirmed what her ears told her.

The floor was immaculate. There was no dust.

Her fingers tested the "clean" path left behind the orb, and she could feel a shallow divot in the floor's surface. And during her brief examination, the golden orb had run in tight circles around the floor, leaving a widening divot behind it in crisscrossing paths. White powder clung to its surface, painting over its glowing luminescence. Within seconds, the orb doubled in size. Then it doubled again.

"Guys!" Connie yelled, pushing herself back in alarm. "It's eating the floor!"

"What are you—whoa!" A yellow spade of hair emerged over the edge of the platform only to shrink back at the sight of the zooming sphere.

Anger rushed through Connie as she watched the baseball-sized orb scraping up loops and circles of floor. She couldn't tell if her anger came from her half-hollow or if it drained into it, but neither half could hold it anymore. "You're ruining my space mission," she growled at the orb. Her fists clenched until they hurt. "You RUINED my space mission!" she bellowed.

She tilted forward and leapt at the orb. Gravity's weak hold left her hanging in the air for what seemed like forever, but at last she drifted onto the zigzagged trenches left in the orb's wake. Her lips curled back from her teeth as, with a little kick, she glided sideways to catch the orb on its next pass.

Though her fury made her strong, and determined, it failed to remind Connie of a few continuing developments in her situation: that the floor feeding the orb was made of white stone that, even pulverized, would possess a significant density; that the orb had only continued to pick up speed while it gobbled up pulverized floor; and that the speedy orb had grown into roughly the size of a yoga ball.

So when that tremendous stone sphere plowed through Connie's legs at full speed, she didn't feel any sense of righteousness. She didn't feel foolish either, though, even when the impact flipped her through the air like a screaming caber toss. The only thing she felt was the explosive pain in her shins, a pain so fierce that it filled her eyes with darkness and shooting stars.

Something grabbed her, cradling her head and spine to ease away the spinning. She felt air rushing around her, and as her eyesight cleared of stars she saw a blue haze above her. "Are you alright?" the haze asked in Lapis's voice.

Connie blinked her eyes clear and took stock of her new altitude. Lapis had caught Connie out of the air and was looping them both back to Peridot at the top of the platform. Meanwhile, the orb, seemingly unimpressed with Connie's sense of outrage, continued to gobble up wide swaths of floor, and had grown to be as tall as Connie.

The little engineer scampered to meet them as Lapis landed. "Connie Jade! Are you hurt? Do you need new bones? I never learned to make new bones! Curse my lack of foresight! Earth is full of spare bones, I could—"

"Peridot!" Connie snapped as Lapis lowered her onto her feet. "I don't—"

The instant her soles pressed to the floor, a white-hot pain erupted in both of her shins, filling her eyes with stars again. It was only because of the reduced gravity that she didn't pass out. Her full Earth weight would have folded her legs like accordions. Each of her shins throbbed around a raw red patch, with a deeper red bloom surrounding that, guaranteed to become a tapestry of black and blue bruising within the hour. But when she touched gingerly at the bone, she didn't think she felt a break.

"I don't need new bones," Connie assured the Gem, breathless with pain. "I might want new ones right now, but I'm okay."

An explosive crack from below smothered Peridot's reply. Startled, all three of them hurried back to the platform's edge, Connie's ginger little hops getting her there last. She had to nestle between the two Gems to see.

Another crack resounded as the orb, now large enough to plug up the double doors of The Big Donut, pounded itself into the bottom step. It rolled back and pounded again, and again, filling the chamber with deafening reverberations that Connie could feel in her oh-so-aching bones. The orb's vicious efforts broke huge swaths of the base of the platform, scattering rubble across the floor. But those poundings took their toll on the sphere as well, lacing its surface with thick fractures.

"It's breaking itself," Peridot observed. Her hands flew into the air, and she cried, "We win by default!"

As the orb jerked back from its self-made crater, a geyser of rubble followed it. Only this geyser did not spray, or drift in the low gravity. It cleaved together into a tightly-packed shaft that adhered to the orb's surface. A cluster of five short nubs wriggled at the end of the shaft, which bent at the midpoint to raise those nubs high.

And Connie realized then that the shaft protruding from the orb was an arm.

The arm reached down to press against the floor, lifting its orb body over itself. It slammed the orb back down, shattering the floor in an explosion of sound that yielded no debris, for the broken pieces of floor were now stuck to the orb in two long, thick stalks that vaguely resembled the nascent arm. And as the orb rose up once more, those two new stalks shaped themselves into legs.

The three-limbed thing lurched back at the stairs, and its orb body started to flatten and stretch. Shoulders, hips, and a massive torso shaped themselves from grinding stone and powder. The center of the chest protruded in a thick, faceted bauble that could only be a gemstone, or at least a facsimile of one made from debris. It slammed its empty shoulder into the steps, gathering a second arm to match its first. Then it slammed its empty neck into the widening crater in the platform and pulled back with a completed head.

Connie stared into the rocky, jagged face of something that looked like a Gem, albeit of a kind she had never seen before. The rubble creature possessed blocky features—head, limbs, torso, even nose and lips and eyes, all rectangular. Its gaze swept emptily across the room as if to take in its own swaths of destructive creation. Connie guessed that the creature stood more than ten feet tall, judging by how many of the platform's steps it eclipsed.

"It looks like a Bauxite?" Lapis said. Her voice teetered between confusion and terror.

Peridot folded her arms and sneered down at the rubble creature. "That is 'not' a Bauxite," she declared.

Stone parted with a rapport like a gunshot, and the rubble creature opened its mouth. The piecemeal rock crackled and grinded as its lips tested themselves. When the creature spoke, the whole chamber rumbled with its words. "I am Bauxite Facet Five, Cut One-Jay-El," it said in a deep feminine voice.

"She says she's a Bauxite," Lapis said, her voice tipping toward confusion.

"I heard her! But she's not a Bauxite!" howled Peridot. "She's made out of floor!"

Oblivious to Peridot's objections, the self-ascribed Bauxite lumbered toward the shattered steps that had made it. Between each ponderous footfall, its voice continued, "I was created in Earth's Prime Kindergarten to serve at the behest of Pink Diamond. Like all Bauxites, I lived to lift up the foundational elements of our civilization. As construction materials arrived to Earth from the Galaxy Warp, I would take them to the sites of our colony's future temples and monuments, raising them under the directions of our Bismuth overseers."

The volume of Bauxite's story vibrated deep in Connie's chest, but its tone and cadence teased her mind differently. The creature's voice was no monstrous growl, no avalanche-as-words as she'd always imagined a rock monster's voice would be. It sounded like a She, and spoke more like one of Connie's teachers, patient and steady and doggedly informative.

Bauxite drew its fist back and then punched the platform deep in the crater. The whole chamber quaked with an eruption of rubble pluming out from under the blow, these rocks scattering instead of joining the strange creation. Bauxite punched again, and again, digging deeper into the platform with each heavy blow. And its lecture continued.

"But then came Rose Quartz." Bwoom! "Her lies corrupted the purpose of so many Gems." Thoom! "I fell among the first of her corruptions, turning against my Diamond and my design." Bwoom! "She instilled violence in me, and forced me to attack innocent Gems." Thoom!

The Moon's weak gravity left Connie floating just above the surface of the quaking platform. Peridot and Lapis, though, were thrown from their feet by the force of the creature's onslaught.

"Why does she hate these stairs so much?" Lapis cried, sprawled across the seat of the throne with her long fingers wrapped over one armrest.

Crouched on all fours like a panicking cat, Peridot squalled, "It's digging through the platform! If it damages the data core underneath us, we'll lose all the information we need!"

Which, Connie realized, had been Polarite's intent all along. The off-world scientist must have required something from Pink's records as well, perhaps even information on the Celerity Forge or the Opulence, and thought to booby trap the site in case any Crystal Gem came up with the same idea. Connie had to appreciate that kind of clever foresight, even while it threatened to ruin their mission and possibly kill them.

"Peridot," Connie snapped, "get that patch connected."

"But—" The engineer began to protest, but another Bwoom! rocked the ground beneath them.

"I'll distract Bauxite," Connie said, and felt strangely proud at how confident she had made such a ridiculous claim sound. "Lapis, you…"

When she glanced at the throne, her heart sank as she saw a look of absolute terror wracking Lapis's delicate features. The lithe blue Gem might have been the most powerful force on Earth, but she wasn't on Earth at that moment. She had no water to protect her and no way to escape unless she could fly through a reinforced dome or slip past their enigmatic golem foe. The Gem's eyes shimmered with silent pleading as she met Connie's gaze.

"…you stay here. Help Peridot," Connie finished. "I got this."

At least one part of Connie had confidence in her boast, for a glowing sailcloth fwmped out of Jade's gemstone and into her hands.

"You know what? I can actually use you." Connie's fists wrung the sailcloth tightly as she stared down at the not-a-Gem who had already smashed a dozen feet deep into the platform. Swallowing hard, Connie muttered, "Here goes nothing," and pushed off the top step.

The slow descent gave her far too much time to question all of her recent life choices. Still, she fell onward, dropping with one-sixth the force she was accustomed to, until she bounced lightly onto Bauxite's head.

All through her pulverizing, Bauxite never stopped extolling her misdeeds. "I toppled the Snow Spire, that grand outpost I had once helped to erect. I joined in an unnatural fusion to vanquish a Nephrite scout legion. Never once did I show remorse. Rose Quartz's corruption was absolute. Irreversible."

Rock shards peppered the air, forcing Connie to shield her face from the pugilistic excavation. Taking up the sailcloth by its corners, she looped the cloth over Bauxite's face. The creature continued to pound through stone without pause. As she'd suspected, covering the golem's eyes did nothing to slow its digging. Whatever Bauxite was, it saw the world through some other means.

So Connie planted her heels in Bauxite's shoulders and yanked back on the cloth with everything she had. Gem strength, Gem strength, Gem strength! she chanted, and loosed the boundaries on her half-hollow.

With her legs screaming in protest, Connie dragged the stone head backwards, forcing Bauxite off-balance. The golem staggered backwards, its oversized hands reaching up to snatch the fulcrum pulling it backwards. Each of its hands could have crushed Connie with room to spare. But the golem's rock body didn't have the give of flesh and bone, or of photomatter. Its arms couldn't angle backwards enough to pluck Connie off its neck. It continued to stagger, flailing.

"By Rose Quartz's betrayal, and by my faith in her lies, I was abandoned on Earth, quarantined to keep the rebellion's sickness from spreading. We acted as beasts. Our sickness turned us into beasts," Bauxite said, muffled by the cloth over its face.

Connie grinned viciously, feeling her half-hollow swell as her efforts drove Bauxite back from the platform step by step. She felt a surge through her body that pulled the anvil-sized head of the golem back another inch, achingly closer to the toppling point. Bauxite's stagger built up speed into a full, lurching stride.

But Connie's smile withered when she realized why Bauxite was actually picking up speed. She glanced over her shoulder and shocked at the sight of the oncoming crystal wall, which Bauxite backed toward at full speed to crush its wrangler against the inside of the dome.

A light push sent Connie overtop Bauxite's head. Then she yanked on the sailcloth still wrapped around Bauxite's face, pulling herself through low gravity into a long, sideways drop that launched her away from the golem. A crunch of glass on stone resonated behind her, making her heart drop. With time to spare in her long slow fall, she flipped herself around, then winced as Bauxite pulled away from the glass to reveal a milky patch where its head had collided with the dome. Whatever its material, the dome had held without cracking, but Bauxite's head had scraped or warped the material to opacity. Any worse damage might threaten its integrity, which would mean explosive decompression, which would mean no more Connie.

None the worse for wear, Bauxite straightened and began lumbering at Connie. Its hands joined together in a grasp the size of a bulldozer's blade. "I am Bauxite Facet Five, Cut One-Jay-El. I was created in Earth's Prime Kindergarten to serve at the behest of Pink Diamond," it said.

"I heard you the first time," Connie taunted. As she landed, she reached out with her half-hollow, gathering the air behind the golem into the beginnings of a grenade.

A low, keening groan filled the chamber, emanating from the entirety of the dome all at once.

"Connie Jade, no!" Peridot screamed from the top of the platform. Her voice sounded more distant than it should have. "We're in a pressurized environment!"

Connie drew a breath to shout back, and then staggered, lightheaded. The last of her oxygenated thoughts coalesced around Peridot's warning.

Of course. The dome being pressurized meant that it had been designed to withstand a constant internal pressure pushing out against it. If Connie changed that pressure by capturing the finite air supply within the power of Jade's gemstone, the dome might crumple in on itself. And even if it survived the pressure drop, the increased pressure wave from the air grenade could pop the dome like a crystal balloon. And that assumed that Connie could retain consciousness while she pressed all of the air into a fixed point far away from where her lungs actually needed it.

With as much finesse as she could manage, Connie unclenched the air from her half-hollow's grasp. The atmosphere of the chamber returned to an equilibrium, quieting the dome's creakings. Connie breathed a full-lunged sigh of relief.

Then she yelped and leapt, narrowly missing Bauxite's fist as it smashed the floor where she'd stood. "Like all Bauxites, I lived to lift up the foundational elements of our civilization," the golem droned.

Legs throbbing, Connie dangled helplessly above the floor. Her instinctive jump had thrown her out of immediate danger only to strand her in midair. She drifted, thrashing her arms and legs, utterly helpless to escape as Bauxite reach up to pluck her from her slow fall.

One end of the sailcloth still dangled from her fist. Snatching up the other end, she clenched two corners in either fist and grasped at the air with her half-hollow again. The dome wouldn't survive an air grenade, but she hoped it would forgive a little circulation.

She pushed a gust of air into the sailcloth and clutched the ends for dear life as the cloth yanked her upwards. Connie's wind mastery was a pale shadow of what Jade could have done. On Earth, the gust would have barely staggered Connie. But she was on the Moon. Her favorite moon. She knew its gravity wouldn't let her down.

She rode the sailcloth like a parachute straight into the air, trying to ignore the screaming pain in her arms that threatened to outdo the pain in her legs. "As construction materials arrived to Earth from the Galaxy Warp, I would take them to the sites of our colony's future temples and monuments, raising them under the directions of our Bismuth overseers," she heard from far beneath her.

The gust petered out high above the top of the platform. Looking down, Connie could see Peridot furiously at work in the ruins of the console with Lapis at her side. Whatever their progress, she didn't see a phone anywhere, which meant they couldn't be very close to finished.

Something between a laugh and a sob wracked Connie's throat as she dangled. Her eyes grew blurry, stinging, and she couldn't tell if it was from tears or sweat.

Wait.

Letting go of one end of the cloth, Connie let herself descend toward the platform, aiming for the center-ish of the square through the wet haze of her vision. "Lapis!" she cried. She thought she could see the blue smudge looking up in reply. "Skin water!"

A long moment crawled by filled only with the sounds of Bauxite stomping back toward the crater she had started in the base of the platform. "But then came Rose Quartz," it said. Bwoom!

"Close your eyes," Lapis called upwards. "I don't want to accidentally pull them out."

Connie screwed her eyes shut and clenched her lips into a tight line. An instant later, she felt a bizarre sensation, like something had grabbed every inch of her body at once. The all-encompassing touch slithered like a living thing, making her feel like she had been swallowed. Then, without warning, the touch ripped all of her body forward. Her skin tried to jump off her bones. Her clothes billowed, stretching to the point of exploding off of her at the seams. The shoes flew off her feet with the socks still inside them.

And then it was over. The touch vanished. Connie opened one crusty eyelid, then the other, grateful that she still had both eyes, though she had to blink a dozen times just to moisten them into functioning again. Every inch of Connie's skin felt somehow desiccated and greasy at the same time, too dry and too oily to stand. But as her bare feet caught the platform, she saw that the minor discomfort had been well worth it.

Lapis stood tall, holding aloft her palm. A sphere of water maybe the size of a jumbo jawbreaker floated above her hand. The Gem's expression had transformed from sheer terror into grim, righteous anger. Connie had never seen this kind of ramrod defiance in the blue Gem before, not even when Flint and Milky had attacked her on the farm.

"Thanks, Connie," Lapis said, her voice brittle but hard.

"No problem," Connie wheezed through cracked lips. She swallowed, trying to soothe her parched throat.

"Her lies corrupted the purpose of so many Gems." The platform shook with a new Thoom! and a spray of debris from below.

Narrowing her eyes at the floating pebbles, Lapis growled, "I'll take care of this." Her wings snapped out from her back, and she launched herself over the edge with her tiny arsenal of water in hand.

In the next instant, the violent shaking of the platform stopped. The sounds of stone being mercilessly pulverized continued.

Connie crouched next to the ruins of Pink Diamond's console, where Peridot had yanked a small thicket of wiring out of the floor and buried herself up to the knees in the delicate cords. "Peridot?" Connie prompted her.

Peridot lifted her hands out of the thicket, unveiling a deconstructed smartphone cupped in her palms. The case lay discarded, exposing the phone's innards. Six or seven of the wires were jammed into the circuit board of the phone, and the phone's screen flashed with sequences of unrecognizable glyphs.

"I'm trying, Connie Jade!" the engineer complained. "I've connected to the database, but teaching it to talk to this primitive machine is nigh-impossible. It's taken me this long just to figure out how to display any data at all. It's just scanning through all of the files as one conglomerated file until I figure out how to demarcate—"

Thunder cracked below, and Bauxite stumbled out of its crater, slamming back into the dome wall and collapsing onto its hand and knees. Lapis strode across the floor and gathered her jawbreaker of water back to her hand. She stopped before her toppled foe with a hand cocked on her hip.

"I fell among the first of her corruptions, turning against my Diamond and my design," the golem rumbled, pushing itself back to its feet.

"You're big," Lapis said. "Big doesn't impress me. You're stone? I move mountains."

"She instilled violence in me, and forced me to attack innocent Gems." Its fist rose to smash the blue Gem.

With a gesture, Lapis flattened her water sphere into a pizza-sized disc, and then flung it through Bauxite's elbow. The sound of crackling rock pierced the air, and the golem's fist thudded into the floor, trailing a severed arm. Another gesture from Lapis zipped the disc in a tight turn behind Bauxite, then through its opposite shoulder, dropping the other arm to the floor with an even louder crack!

The disc leapt back to her hand, and Lapis gathered it back into a ball. "I'm not that innocent," she said. Then she let the ball fly.

Bauxite's head exploded.

Dust and shards filled the air, pluming above the jagged stump of the golem's neck. The creature dropped to its knees, the room quaking with its apparent defeat.

Peridot's body unclenched at the vicious finale, her eyebrows rising in surprise. "Oh. Well, I suppose I now have ample time to program a proper interface. Good."

As Connie's dumbfounded shock began to fade, she stared at the golem's remains, which still knelt in front of Lapis. Despite the loss of its head, the golem had not staggered or toppled. "Lapis…?" Connie called uncertainly.

Lapis turned around, wearing a tremendous grin. "Did you see that? That was amazing! I tried tough-talking him, and it worked! All of those goofy one-liners really do make you feel less scared in a fight."

Motion blurred behind the blue Gem, and Connie's bewilderment withered into horror. "Look out!" she screamed at Lapis.

Whirling, Lapis jumped backwards, barely avoiding the headless-armless golem as it slammed its shoulder into the floor. Spiderweb cracks spilled underfoot through the smooth tiles, chasing Lapis into the air. Then, as the shoulder pulled back, it withdrew a fresh arm made from broken stones and dust out of the shattered floor. Its empty elbow slammed down as well, and it drew out a second fresh arm. On hands and knees, it pounded its neck deep into the growing crater beneath it.

As the golem rose once more, a new head of pressed stone sat atop its shoulders. "I toppled the Snow Spire, that grand outpost I had once helped to erect. I joined in an unnatural fusion to vanquish a Nephrite scout legion," it said with its new mouth. Its empty eyes stared straight through Lapis. "Never once did I show remorse."

Lapis flapped higher. Her water became a disc again, and she lashed out in a flurry of swipes. "Goofy one-liners didn't work after all!" she cried.

The water disc sliced through Bauxite's arm. This time, its opposite hand snapped up and caught the falling limb, jamming it back into place. The disc hacked crosswise through a knee, but Bauxite stomped its stump down and reattached the leg. Cuts across the face and chest went ignored. Those paltry wounds scabbed themselves shut, filling in with smaller pebbles.

Lapis called back her disc, pulling it into a globe again. The remains of her water totaled into something smaller than a cue ball. Evaporation, and the dry slurry of powder and pebbles that comprised Bauxite, were taking its toll on the dwindling water supply. "This place is too dry! I'm losing water!" Lapis cried. "Connie, do you have any more?"

Connie swallowed, and her throat ached in one giant dry lump. She hadn't had much to drink that day, and suspected that every ounce of spare water she'd had was already in Lapis's hand. Maybe more than that, given how much her skin itched and eyes burned. "Just hold on!" she shouted. Then to Peridot she croaked, "How much longer?"

"I don't know! Hours? Days?" Peridot snapped. "No one has ever done this before! The data is here, but it's all jammed together in one continuous stream." She swiped her thumb across the screen, switching from one page of glyphs to the next, and the next, and the next. None of it looked intelligible to Connie. "If we had a day to just sit down and scroll through the data—"

"We don't have a day!" Connie exploded, helpless as she watched Lapis hammering at Bauxite with the dwindling ball of water. "We just have…"

Connie fell silent. Her hand drifted up to grasp the stone in her chest.

"Rose Quartz's corruption was absolute. Irreversible," Bauxite said, rebuilding herself faster than Lapis's onslaught could tear her apart.

"Peridot," Connie said, this time in a calm tone, "can you make the screen scroll through all of that data automatically?"

"Well, obviously," Peridot snapped, sounding peevish at Connie's previous shouting. "But I can't read it faster than I already…am…" Her eyes widened, her face slackening with realization.

"Thirty screens per second," Connie told her. She thought they might be able to get away with a faster rate, but wouldn't risk losing any of the data for it. "Lapis, hold on for a few minutes!" she called down to the floor below.

The remaining water was barely a marble zipping through the air beside Lapis in flight. "Minutes?" she shrieked, and darted around a clumsy swipe from the golem. The marble bounced off Bauxite's skin leaving cracks that sealed themselves within seconds.

"Peridot!" Connie hissed.

The engineer's tongue poked through her teeth as her thumbs danced on the screen. "Almost… There!" She stuffed the dismantled phone into Connie's hands. "Touch the screen. Don't blink," Peridot told her gravely.

Connie blinked hard several times, squeezing the last of her body's spare water into her eyes. Then she tapped the screen, and booked.

Images flashed across the smartphone, page after page of Gem glyphs arranged in columns and rows, appearing and vanishing too quickly for her conscious mind to register them. As the pages strobed, Connie fought to keep her focus loose on the screen, staring at all of it without isolating any one incidental glyph at the expense of a whole page. Seconds crawled by. Her eyes began to ache. Then burn. Then throb.

All the while, Bauxite continued its lecture. Distantly, Connie could hear it begin anew all over again. The battle cries she heard from Lapis quickly collapsed into sobs of alarm at too many close calls and near misses.

Connie forced her eyelids open as far as she could to keep from blinking while an entire database flashed before her eyes. The lost secrets of Pink Diamond became an indelible part of her at thirty frames per second.

"By Rose Quartz's betrayal, and by my faith in her lies, I was abandoned on Earth, quarantined to keep the rebellion's sickness from spreading." The sounds of battle crashed nearer in the chamber. Connie felt the platform rock underneath her, but she kept her gaze locked on the screen.

Glyphs. Glyphs. Glyphs. Glyphs. None of it meant anything to Connie. Yet, when the pages suddenly stopped changing, she panicked. Her fingertip hammered the screen as she tried to get it moving again before her eyes gave up. "Peridot, it's broken!" she wailed.

Peridot squeezed under Connie's arm to look at the screen. "No, it worked! That's the last page!" she said. Stepping away, she gave Connie a hesitant, searching look. "Did it work?"

Connie tried to picture any one of the glyph pages in her mind. They all rushed through her thoughts at once, the sheer volume of information making her stagger. "I got it. I got it!" Her voice shook in a disbelieving laugh.

"Way to assimilate information, Connie Jade!" Peridot cheered. "And of course, way to prepare said information, Perid—"

Blue hands shoved the two of them off the platform. Peridot tumbled down the stairs in a flurry of limbs and grunts. But Connie floated, twisting around to see Lapis sprawled out on the platform where they had been standing, her flying tackle having launched them to safety. The spritely Gem loomed under the shadow of Bauxite, who had scaled the platform and stood poised to crush that very spot.

And so it did.

"No!" Connie screamed into the explosion of dust and stone that plumed up from Bauxite's fist hammering the floor where Lapis lay. She watched the dust intently, hoping she would see watery wings pierce the shroud and carry the Gem to safety. But nothing came. And Connie's eyes throbbed for the tears she didn't have left in her.

As Connie's bare toes finally touched the ground, the dust above began to settle. Through the gentle rain of powder that coated her greasy skin, Connie saw the ruins of the platform take shape. The top three levels had been obliterated, and the center of the platform had collapsed into a hollow of broken stone and ruined alien machinery. No trace of the throne, or anything that had stood near it, remained.

Bauxite loomed atop the ruins. "We acted as beasts," the golem said.

Connie was leaping before she even realized it. Her half-hollow opened its borders, flooding her tired and aching body with all of the worst of her that had been brewing inside it. Lightning stormed through her veins, and she flew over the steps to the top of the ruins, her teeth pulled back in a snarl.

Her fists clenched, and she felt her fingers squeezing around something. Distantly she realized that she had held onto Jade's sailcloth through the database's booking. Now it was the only weapon she had to stop the dead-eyed homunculus.

"Our sickness turned us into beasts," Bauxite lamented, turning its fists to meet Connie's leap.

Connie screamed. She swung the sailcloth around, hoping that maybe she could tangle it around one of Bauxite's fingers, or use it to alter her course and avoid being pulped on the golem's cantaloupe-sized knuckles.

But then the sailcloth stopped being a sailcloth.

The metallic green fabric did not change. But as Connie swung it before her, the material began to writhe in her grip. It became taut in portions, flattening itself, then folding over itself, forming new corners that tucked under folds that creased into other folds, all faster than her eye could follow. That same folding happened under her grasp too, twitching and pushing at her hand so quickly that she almost dropped the cloth in surprise.

With three final creases, the cloth stood rigid in her grasp, its shape extending before her. She swung it on instinct to meet Bauxite's fist—

—and knocked it aside, sending three of its fingers tumbling to the floor far below.

As Bauxite staggered back, Connie landed atop the rubble and stared at the shape in her hand. It still bore the folds and crease-marks of the sailcloth. Yet as Connie ran her hand up its flat length, she felt something akin to a smooth alloy. It fit her hand perfectly and with immaculate balance. She had never seen anything like it before, yet she knew every inch of it by heart.

It was a sword. Long, but not as long as a saber. Broad, but less so than a broadsword or gladius. Strong, with the barest hint of flexibility. A wicked edge graced both sides, the blade paper-thin but harder than steel. It featured a stubby guard just wide enough to protect her fingers without getting in her way. Connie couldn't have imagined such a weapon, yet it seemed to fit every part of her, body and style.

Bauxite had recovered. Its fist swung again to flatten Connie into paste.

Connie hopped, keeping herself just above the uneven rubble. The green sword flashed in her quick hand. This time an entire fist went drifting away from Bauxite. Connie barely felt the blade slow as it passed through the tightly packed wrist of the golem. Before it could rebuild its hand, she touched down and pushed off again.

"I am Bauxite Facet Five, Cut One-Jay—"

Her sword cleaved the bottom jaw off the creature, silencing its lecture. She moved in a green blur, carving stone from stone, lopping off fingers, fists, feet, all faster than Bauxite could recover. Connie roared in fury and swung, two-handed, becoming a storm. Jagged rocks blasted in all directions at the touch of her sword.

Her sword.

Deep in Bauxite's pitted, gouged chest, Connie saw a glimpse of light. She tried to cut deeper, but the golem's thick body resisted, and hurried to rebuild itself around the glimmer inside of it. With no arms left to strike, Bauxite flopped itself forward, seeking to crush Connie under its bulk. Gravity worked against Connie this time, and the move caught her between floating steps, scrabbling for leverage she couldn't reach with her bare toes above the rubble.

The rocks beneath them burst apart, and from the scattering remains of the platform, Lapis arose, rock and dust pouring from her form in thick rivulets. A primal scream shook the Gem's body, howling with such fury that it stopped Connie and her stone lecturer cold.

Lapis's wings rose and curled into giant makeshift fists, which swung back and then hammered into Bauxite's chest with the force of a cannon shot. The effort knocked Lapis clean off her feet and across the rubble, slamming her into a cluster of packed stone slabs. But Bauxite suffered more of the blow, and the towering creature's chest shattered.

As the rocks bled out of Bauxite's shape, Connie saw the golden orb at its heart now exposed. She leapt and thrust her sword into the orb with all of her might, throwing the full might of her body behind one last strike. The sword carved through the orb's luminous shape and burst it into motes that spilled over her sword's guard and across her hand.

Bauxite's form crumbled, raining across Connie in a low-gravity shower of dusty rock.

The constant low barrage didn't hurt, but as it piled atop her, Connie took care to keep herself from being buried. Coughing, Connie wiped the dust out of her eyes and felt about, calling, "Lapis?"

Another hand found hers, and Lapis appeared through the settling dust. The Gem had rocks in her hair, and her soft blue hues had turned gray under all the muck. Dark splotches mottled her form, bruises and scrapes from her lone stand against the enemy. But her smile shone brightly through all of it. "Connie," she said, sighing her name in relief.

Connie fell forward to wrap the Gem in a fierce embrace. "I thought you were shattered," she moaned, and squeezed with everything she had left.

"Me too," admitted Lapis. The Gem held Connie just as fiercely. "Then I heard you fighting, and I…"

"You were awesome!" Connie pulled back far enough so Lapis could see her grinning. "I've never seen your wings do that before!"

Lapis smirked. "Me? How about 'that'?" She jerked her chin to the sword resting half-buried in the debris beside Connie.

Connie struggled for an answer as she pulled the blade out of the stones. She didn't know what to make of it yet. One thing was certain, though: the blade was hers. Hers, not Jade's.

She didn't know how to feel about that yet, either.

"Lapis!" Peridot cried, clambering up the broken steps to join them. Her feet scrabbled for purchase in the loose stone, but she finally made it to the top, and threw herself around Lapis's waist in a desperate hug. "You're okay. You're okay. You're okay."

Her voice dropped into a murmur as she kept repeating the words, until they grew too soft to be meant for anyone but herself. Connie stepped back, giving the pair room to breathe.

Sobering, Lapis returned Peridot's embrace, this time more gently than she had with Connie. "I'm okay," she agreed softly.

Peridot stiffened suddenly, pulling away with a sharp step. She cleared her throat and said, "Yes, well, of course you are. I never had a doubt. You're quite the capable specimen of Lazuli, after all."

"Darn right I am," Lapis said, grinning warmly.

A matching grin spread beneath Peridot's visor. It didn't last long, however, as her gaze trailed down to the carnage beneath their feet. "That's the end of Pink Diamond's database, I'm afraid. At least, the software version. We still have our wetware version." She winked at Connie. "Aside from a few unexpected setbacks, I believe we can consider this mission a total success. Eh, Connie Jade?"

Connie looked down at her blade, her former sailcloth, the tip of which trailed through the ruins of the database that now lived only inside of her. Her gaze rose up and out through the battered dome at the vast, unknowable lunar sea, and at the infinite, un-twinkling stars cast above them in perfect clarity. Her body itched, ached, creaked, and trembled.

It felt good, she decided. Or at least, good enough.

"Total success," Connie echoed, and sank down to rest atop the debris.

Chapter Text

"Total success?" her mother repeated, stressing the hard consonants into piercing needles that stabbed at Connie even through her phone.

Connie sat against the back of the barn, taking advantage of the quiet clearing behind the farm for a long overdue phone call. Sun-baked metal pressed its heat through her tank top and steeped a wealth of aches and bruises she had brought back with her from the moon. The warmth paired well with the belly full of cold water she had guzzled from a nearby faucet hose, which she kept kinked in one hand for when she inevitably wanted another drink. Her other hand cradled her phone, currently on speaker, because lifting it to her ear in full Earth gravity seemed exhausting.

From the moment their victorious trio had returned to Earth, the name of the game had been "damage control." The ramp of the Roaming Eye had lowered to reveal Garnet, Amethyst, Pearl, Steven, and Pumpkin waiting for them, and only the last of those seemed happy to see their arrival.

Steven never said a word. He simply raised his phone, displaying a long list of missed and taken calls from both of Connie's parents. The haunted look on his face said the rest.

As soon as Connie had turned her phone back on, she had found notifications for over fifty missed calls, nineteen voice mails, and a novel's worth of backlog texts made in all-caps. So she'd excused herself to the far side of the barn, leaving Peridot and Lapis to fill the others in on their adventure while Connie steeled herself for some well-deserved parental wrath.

The call had been going for over twenty minutes. Yet her parents didn't sound any less upset.

"I told you in my text, I didn't think there would be any fighting," Connie insisted, trying to sound reasonable. "The Gems have been to the Moon before, and it's been safe every time."

Which of course ignored the time Steven had accidentally gotten sucked out an airlock. But since he had been safe while inside of the base, Connie counted it as a critical distinction, and absolutely not a lie of omission.

"Connie, you are trying to change the subject," her father said. The steel in his voice was unmistakable. "We acknowledge that fighting is something that happens with this thing you're doing. The issue is that you left the planet!"

"I texted you!" Connie protested, her voice climbing high. "We agreed that I would text or call before every mission. And I did!"

"And then what happened?" her mother prompted. "Because I texted you back less than a minute later asking you to explain. Why couldn't I reach you?"

Connie's head sank between her shoulders. An hour ago, she had been a space warrior. Now she felt like a little girl staring up at her parents and their abacus again, waiting to see how long she would be grounded. "I texted right before I got into the ship," she said.

The phone stared back at her, ticking away the seconds of the call as her parents refused to acknowledge the answer, as if they already knew the truth.

Because of course they did. Parents always already knew everything when came to getting in trouble.

"And then I kinda…turned off my phone," Connie admitted in a shrinking voice.

The longest moment of silence in the universe stretched on after her answer. Then, eons later, her mother said, "Because you knew we would have concerns."

That was part of the truth. But Connie didn't have another distinction-slash-lie-of-omission in her. One had been bad enough. "Because I was afraid you wouldn't let me go" she admitted.

"…I see," said her father.

The disappointment in his voice made her eyes wobble. She swallowed the quaver out of her voice and tried to sound neutral as she asked, "Am I in trouble?" The question seemed like a moot point, but she couldn't stand the suspense any longer.

She could hear the wordless conversation happening between her parents. They frequently held entire conversations in front of her using only their eyes, a silence she had come to know well. When she could actually see them, she might have some idea of what they were thinking, but the tinny sounds coming through speakerphone left her helpless to guess.

Which is why she was stupefied to hear her mother say, "No."

"No?" It took Connie three tries to echo the word. Her mouth wouldn't work properly, and her ears refused to believe what they'd heard.

"No," her father affirmed. "You did exactly what we asked you to do. Everything you did is technically correct. Do you feel good about it?"

For other kids Connie knew, the question would be a trap. They would never really feel bad about winning an argument with their parents on a technicality. Any other kid from school would have been doing cartwheels to celebrate getting out of being grounded.

But Connie's stomach wasn't flipflopping because of any cartwheels. "No," she admitted.

"Why is that?" her mother asked in a way that made it nowhere near a question.

"Because I cheated," Connie said. "And because I made you worry about me. I'm sorry for that. Especially that."

More unnerving parental silence answered her, until finally one of her parents—her father, she guessed—blew a long, deep breath that rattled the phone connection.

"Going forward," her mother said sternly, "you're still allowed to leave Beach City as long as one of the Gems goes with you. Besides Steven! But before you leave the planet again, we expect you to talk to us first. And that's 'talk,' not text or leaving a voicemail. Is that fair?"

Connie's insides melted in relief. She sagged forward, feeling her chin clunk onto the green stone beneath her neck. "Yes," she sighed. "That's fair. And I really am sorry."

"We know," her father assured her, sounding a little less peeved than a moment before. "Just as long as you're aware that we aren't done talking about this. You're going to call us again tonight before you go to bed and tell us the full story of what happened up there."

Her melting innards froze in an instant. "I didn't lie about anything!" she said quickly.

"I know you didn't." This time she could hear the trace of a smile creeping into her father's voice. "But my daughter went to the Moon today. Did you really think I wouldn't want to hear every detail?"

That same light smile crept into Connie's lips too. "Love you, Dad. Love you, Mom."

"Love you," her parents' voices chimed one after the other.

The phone clicked silent.

Connie pocketed her phone with a sigh. Then she unkinked the hose for another long, cold drink, luxuriating in the rusty well water. The next time she went to the Moon with Lapis, Connie vowed to bring along a canteen. She didn't particularly enjoy being one herself.

Tossing the hose aside, she pushed off the ground, intending to shut off the running faucet. But her hand fell across a hard shape beneath her, and she froze.

Her eyes cast down upon the folded green blade tucked beneath her. She'd clutched the sword tightly all the way from the Moon, making sure that some part of her remained touching it, as if the steel-like cloth would vanish if she let go for even a second. One little thought could dismiss the weapon the same way she dismissed so many sailcloths every other time the persistent little Gem construct had erupted from Jade's stone. Even thinking about thinking that thought to dismiss this construct terrified her.

Fitting the sword back into her hand, Connie let her eyes drift back up, and she stared at the two rows of rusty oversized chimes standing at the center of the clearing behind the barn. The chimes—little more than cobbled pipes cut to specific musical proportions—hung in twin frames built from two-by-fours, with just enough space for a person to stand between them.

The Zephyrphone. Jade's Zephyrphone. Its chimes rocked gently in the breeze, too gently to hit the striking bars built into the bottom of the frames. As far as Connie knew, the instrument had been silent since the recital she and the Gem had put on for their friends one month prior.

With a shaky breath, Connie cast a thought into her half-hollow. Her hand twitched around empty air as a wash of green motes rose up around her, their glimmer dissipating into the clear summer sky. Then she brought her trembling fingers up to Jade's gemstone.

When she hesitated, a nasty little voice arose in the back of her mind. What are you waiting for, human? Your dithering won't change what comes out of my stone.

Connie threw the nasty thought into her half-hollow. The gemstone glowed, and she felt the corner of a sailcloth fill her waiting hand. She yanked the corner as though it were a Band-Aid, and felt her stomach jump as the cloth flipped and wriggled and folded itself in her hand.

By the time the gemstone fell dark, Connie held a new sword. Her sword.

Part of Connie sank in full relief. She didn't know what she would have done if the change in the sailcloth had been a one-time deal.

But the half-hollow part of her sank with the realization that one more piece of Jade was gone from the world.

Sighing, Connie dismissed the new sword and rose, gingerly stepping around the huge puddle that had grown out of the hose and turning off the faucet. She gave the Zephyrphone one last look, and then made for the corner of the barn to join the others.

Her legs almost buckled with the effort. Between the exhaustion of a post-adrenaline high and the sudden return to her full Earth weight, the bruises on her shins felt like they would snap her legs in half. "Ugh, Lapis was right. Gravity sucks!" she groaned.

As she rounded the corner, her nose knocked against something that said "Ouch!" She staggered backwards, clutching at her stinging face, and saw Steven doing the same with his forehead right in front of her.

His wince became wide-eyed alarm. "Sorry! I'm sorry!" he cried.

"Id'h otay," Connie assured him with watery eyes.

"I just… I wanted to… You were gone a while, and… I didn't mean to…" Each time he started to speak, the words crumbled in his mouth. Eventually he stopped trying and stared helplessly, his brows knit in frustration.

As the stinging faded, Connie reluctantly dropped her hands from her face. The way her stomach was flipflopping, she would have preferred to hide her expression behind something. But she knew she had already put off seeing him for too long, and so drew a breath to steel herself.

"I'm sorry," both of them said at the same time.

Stunned, Connie retreated a step in confusion. "What? Why are you sorry?" she said.

"i'm sorry for asking if you let Bismuth out on purpose," he said, his voice wobbly. Tears glistened in his eyes, and his words tumbled out faster and faster. "Of course you didn't mean to, and I knew that, and I never should have said it to you, and I wanted to tell you right away, but I couldn't find you this morning, so I figured you didn't want to see me, and I wanted to give you some space, but then you went to the Moon, and your parents got freaked out, and I thought you were so mad that I'd made you leave the planet, because that's a LOT of space!"

She watched him hiccuping for breath after his frenzied confession. A part of her wanted to laugh. But the larger, half-hollow part of her choked that laughter before it began.

"Maybe you were wrong," Connie admitted, "but you were almost right. When I went down into the temple, I went to look at Bismuth. I didn't realize it when I did it, but I did. I was wishing she could make me a sword when the windcident unbubbled her. Maybe my powers went off by accident, or maybe Jade's gemstone reacted to what I really wanted. But it's still my fault."

"But you didn't mean to," he insisted, his frown deepening.

Connie grimaced. "I don't think that really matters."

The words seemed to upset Steven more. She almost wished he would be mad at her. At least then they would have that in common.

Instead, his brow slowly unfurrowed, and he said, "Well, Bismuth hasn't done anything since she got out. So maybe it's okay. Maybe it's better if she's free. And after we give her some space too, maybe we can all go talk to her."

Even the Moon might not be enough space for that, Connie thought. Maybe Enceladus. Big maybe.

His features broke into a smile, and the whole world seemed to brighten again. Connie had gotten used to seeing that smile every day, and seeing it again lifted a weight out of her she hadn't known was there. She found herself returning the smile as he looked her up and down. "You must have had a pretty busy day," he remarked.

She looked down at her scrapes and bruises, all lurking beneath a thick coating of Pink Diamond's throne dust. "You know how the Moon is," she said. "Or 'was,' I guess. We kind of trashed the place. Sorry."

Steven waved off the apology. "When you're a Crystal Gem long enough, you're gonna destroy a few places. Honestly, it's impressive it took you this long to get your first one." His appraising look stopped low, and she watched him cringe at the deep bruises in her shins. "That looks like it hurts," he said.

"Yeah, well, it turns out you shouldn't just look before you leap. You should think before it too," Connie tried to joke.

"You want me to…?" He trailed off, pointing at his tongue to finish the question.

Connie twisted around to show him every gritty part of her. "If you think you can find a clean spot," she said. And the instant the words left her mouth, her face came ablaze with embarrassment. "I mean…! I didn't mean…!" she stammered

Steven didn't seem to notice her total humiliation. He gently took her hands, which she'd cleaned with the hose in order to work her phone. Gratefully, Connie waited for his lick of healing spit to cure everything besides her wounded pride.

Instead, though, Steven raised her hands and planted a slow, soft kiss on each set of knuckles, one after the other. A warm glow pulsed in her skin, lingering especially at the point where her skin remembered his lips. She felt sensation washing through her, first with relief of all the aches and pains, and then with something entirely different.

Releasing her hands, he examined his effect on her, satisfied that the bruising on her legs had vanished. Cheeks ruddy, he smiled and said, "I'm really glad you're back. Should we go check in with the others? I know there's still a lot to talk about."

"Yeah… Yeah, in a minute," Connie mumbled. Her legs, now healed, had turned to jelly for some reason, and the force of her heartbeat threatened to knock Jade's stone clean off her chest.

As soon as she trusted herself to walk again, she followed Steven around to the front of the barn. The other Gems had gathered in the shadow of the doors, their voices low as they discussed something of great import.

Their somber mood broke as Peridot brightened and said, "There she is! Our walking database!" She gestured to Connie with a grand sweep of her arms as the two teens joined the Gems' circle.

"Then it's true? You do have the information, even though Pink Diamond's records are...gone?" Pearl asked.

The pale Gem wrung her hands, looking devastated by the thought, and Connie felt surprise at seeing the deep regret glimmering in Pearl's eyes. Her mentor had never spoken of the Moon Base before—oh, if only Connie had thought to ask about Tranquility Tower sooner!—but perhaps Pearl simply mourned the loss of another pre-war site.

"It's all here, I think," Connie agreed and tapped her head. Even as she mentioned it, a glut of alien symbols flashed into her mind with such volume and speed that it caused her to wobble.

Steven steadied her with a hand at her shoulder. The gesture was appreciated, even more so when he kept his hand there. Whatever their spat, or misunderstanding, or whatever-it-was had been, it still loomed fresh in Connie's mind. A little reassurance went a long way.

It definitely had nothing to do with the lingering jelly feelings in her legs. Not a bit.

"Then you know about those places Shard wants? The Celery Gorge and the Oh-Please-What-A-Dumb-Name-Ence?" Amethyst said eagerly.

"The Celerity Forge and the Opulence," Peridot said.

"Man, whatever. Homeworld came up with the dumbest names. I always liked mine better," scoffed the Quartz. "The Kindergarten is just 'home.' The Sea Shrine was 'The Splashy Crashy Castle.' And the Sky Arena was 'Fort Floaty-Fighty.'"

"I always thought that last one was cute," Pearl admitted. When a collective look of surprise came at her from all sides, her smirk became a frustrated huff. "What? I can be silly too, sometimes!"

Stifling her giggles at her mentor's expense, Connie shook her head and explained, "I have the information, but because it's written in Gem language, I can't understand it." Again, the mention of the database made the full glut of information pass through her thoughts. Again, she wobbled, and again, Steven caught her.

Darn jelly legs.

"Her ability to absorb such a large quantity of data she can't understand is as incredible as it is inconvenient," Peridot declared. "But don't worry. Like always, I have a few ideas on how to solve our dilemma. Give me a couple of days to put something together."

"In the meantime," Pearl said, "we can continue to—"

"What about Bauxite?" Lapis snapped.

The sudden outburst startled everyone, Connie included, into speechlessness. Connie rarely saw Lapis offering opinions when the other Gems were around. If anything, Lapis seemed even more withdrawn in the presence of others. Now, though, the blue Gem held the others' gaze with eyes full of righteous outrage.

"The Bauxite on the Moon?" Lapis continued, her voice sharp with accusation. "She told us she was a Crystal Gem, and then she tried to shatter us."

Amethyst seemed befuddled by the accusation. But Pearl and Garnet both shared a meaningful look.

A flash of guilt twisted her prim features, and Pearl admitted, "There was one—"

"It wasn't her," Garnet interrupted flatly.

Peridot gasped in surprise. "Then there is a Bauxite in the Crystal Gems? Three meters tall, abnormally high aluminum content? Gem centrally positioned?" She tapped her chest to mark the spot.

Pearl clapped her hands over her mouth. A swell of tears flushed in her eyes as her muffled voice cried, "Beebaux?"

"Beebaux?" Amethyst echoed in confusion.

Letting her hands drop, Pearl sagged and said, "Big Bauxie. She joined us at the battle for the Snow Spire. When she heard Rose speaking, she dropped a girder right on top of Homeworld's defensive phalanx. We never would have stopped the construction without her."

Realization began to shine through Amethyst's confusion. "I think I remember Rose talking about her. Was she the one who—?"

"Painted," Garnet said, finishing the thought. "She liked to paint different landscapes on the sides of our bases. Like anti-camouflage."

"One time we managed to evacuate an entire base without a fight because the Ruby battalion sent to crush us had stopped outside trying to figure out why our mountain fortress looked like a beach at sunset," Pearl said, and chuckled at the memory.

"She wasn't painting on the Moon!" Lapis snapped, breaking the reverie. "She almost flattened us!"

Pearl answered with a teary glare and snapped back, "It wasn't Beebaux!"

"You weren't there! How do you know?" Lapis demanded hotly.

"Because we bubbled her," said Garnet.

Pearl and Lapis both fell silent at the words. Connie hadn't realized it in the moment, but she had shrunk back from the two Gem's growing anger, putting herself between them and Steven without realizing it.

The implaccable fusion trembled, actually trembled, which made Connie just as uneasy as seeing Lapis and Pearl so furious. "She was with us on the battlefield when the Diamonds launched their final attack. We watched her being corrupted. She was one of the first ones we bubbled, and she's been in the temple ever since."

Connie's chest ached. Once she would have had to imagine such a horror. But being a part of Jade had shown her exactly what it meant to watch someone succumb to the Diamonds' corruption.

Swallowing thickly, Lapis looked back at Pearl. "I… I'm sorry. About what I said. And about your friend," the blue Gem mumbled.

Pearl nodded, and blinked her eyes clear. "Thank you." With a tiny smile, she added, "The real Beebaux would have loved to see the things you and Peridot made. Your 'morks'?"

"Morps," Lapis said, and answered with her own tiny smile.

Before another silence could ensue, Peridot chimed in, "I knew immediately that the creature on the Moon wasn't any kind of Gem. Its repetitive speaking suggests that it was some kind of automaton. And whatever Connie Jade destroyed at its core appeared to be made from semi-solid photomatter without any stone to project it."

Amethyst tilted her head thoughtfully. "What, like Pearl's copies?" she said.

"Perhaps. Though more robust and complex. And capable of constructing and regenerating an exoskeleton made from localized physical material," Peridot mused.

Connie felt a pang of relief to hear Peridot talk through what could easily have been a killing. Because in the heat of battle, Connie hadn't hesitated for one second to plunge her blade through the core of that monstrosity, whether or not it was a Gem. And looking back, she wasn't completely certain if her actions would have changed knowing one way or the other.

That lack of hesitation scared her a little. But it also didn't. And that upset her.

A light harrumph turned Pearl's nose upward. "My holograms are quite complex, thank you," she murmured.

Amethyst, though, just rubbed her jaw and grinned. "A holo-baddie with a crunchy candy shell? Man, I'm sorry I missed that fight."

"You're really not," Connie said, looking back down at her tattered clothes and thick layers of dust.

"I really am. All these patrols with no payoff are giving me a gem-ache," insisted Amethyst.

"There's no such thing," Garnet said. "But we will keep up the patrols. We'll start focusing more on the new network Jade and Peridot unlocked for us, in case Shard's forces doubled back after our first tour through it."

"And I'll get started on a way to pull the information out of Connie Jade's memory," Peridot affirmed. "I believe I can do so with minimal intrusion into her human superstructure, which is a plus."

As Connie squirmed at the idea of what minimal intrusion might mean to the engineer, Amethyst sighed loudly. "Great. More busy work. But at least now we have one more person to help us with all that patrolling-for-nothing." The Quartz gave Connie a sly, knowing grin.

Brightening, Pearl agreed, "Oh, yes! That is, if she feels up to it."

"She will." Even Garnet sounded pleased in her own minimalist way.

Connie shrank back as the Gems' bright expressions fell upon her all at once. The sudden attention put Connie on her back foot, and she looked around in confusion. "Um, what?"

Lapis looked abashed. "Well, we did already tell them about the fight on the Moon. They kind of know about your—"

"Oh, yeah!" Steven's shout lifted him off the ground. "I completely forgot, what with all of the other fate-of-the-world stuff happening! Can we see it? Please?"

"Whip it out!" Amethyst hooted. "Show! Us! Show! Us! Show! Us! Show! Us!"

With Amethyst's chanting and Steven's plaintive excitement, Connie finally understood. The others waited more patiently, but still with encouragement in their faces. Grinning, Connie reached for Jade's gemstone, and sparked a dark thought into her half-hollow.

A cheer rose up all around her as she lifted her sailcloth sword high.

Chapter Text

Connie started her day midair, tumbling in a snarl of blankets. The dream beach and its stacks of rescued books blinked out of existence as her eyes opened in time to collide with the hardwood floor, her cot callously flipped by a purple hand.

A booming voice filled the beach house with far too much cheer for such an early hour. "Who's ready to ruckus?" Amethyst bellowed.

Her day of Moon adventures and sword-conjuring had left Connie exhausted all the way to the bone, morning jog be hanged. But her teenage privilege—nay, right!—to sleep until noon had been literally upended.

"Whoo'zat?" she mumbled. Her brain raced out of slumber to catch up to her body on the floor.

Amethyst had already moved on from the cot to the bed in the loft. The Gem grabbed the corners of the quilt and rolled them, bundling the slumbering form underneath into a plush blanket roll. Then she swung the blanket-sausage and its contents down to the couch below.

Steven spilled out of the unfurling blanket. Splayed across the couch in his pajamas, he blinked and rubbed at the clinging sleep in his eyes. "Did we have another sleepover?" he asked Connie.

"Mnnnghhhhhhhuuuuhhhh," Connie answered.

"Sleepover's over, Little Man," Amethyst shouted, pounding her chest. "Dreamland is gone! You're in the real world now, and the real world is pain, and suffering, and mean! The only chance you have to survive is by getting mean right back in its face. Are you kids mean?" she demanded.

"No!" Steven whined tearily.

"Zmuh?" grumbled Connie.

The door to the temple parted, and Pearl and Garnet entered the house. "Amethyst? Are the children awake?" Pearl called cheerily.

"Almost!" Amethyst called back in a tooth-achingly sweet voice. "Just brushing the last of the snoozle dust from their precious little eyes!" With her back to the other two, Amethyst smacked a fist into her open palm and fixed the teens with a shark-toothed grin.

Connie figured the purple Quartz was goofing on them. Or she'd actually gone crazy and would beat the stuffing out of them for no discernable reason. Either way, Connie's body had already decided to roll over and go back to sleep.

"Time for patrol," Garnet announced.

Her eyes snapped open, and Connie leapt to her feet in a storm of blankets. All traces of sleep rushed out of her, and she felt her whole body vibrating with anticipation. "Patrol? Yes, ma'am! I mean, ma'ams!" she barked.

She grabbed a fistful of clothes from her footlocker and ran for the bathroom. Thirty second later she emerged back into the room more or less ready, her socks mismatched and a hairbrush abandoned somewhere in her gnarled tresses. By that time, Steven had managed to drag himself off the couch, and he padded into the vacant bathroom with his own clothes bundled in his grasp.

Bouncing on her toes, Connie did her best to look serious and attentive. "Ready!" she chirped. "What's the mission today? Are we scouring the Kindergarten? Checking the strawberry fields for more landings? Maybe we need to go back to the Moon? I know my way around that last one now."

A gentle touch moved through her hair, surprising her, and Connie glanced over her shoulder to find Pearl behind her. The pale Gem had extricated the hairbrush from its snarl and drew the brush through Connie's hair with patient, gentle draws.

Nobody except her mother had ever brushed Connie's hair for her. It made her prickle with embarrassment, as if she were a child being fussed over again. But Pearl's touch also felt soft and genuine in a way Connie hadn't realized she'd been missing. It prodded something in her chest, a feeling of homesickness she'd worked hard to bury at the start of her summer. So she stuffed her embarrassment into her half-hollow and leaned back into the Gem's attentions.

"We have two new locations to check today," Pearl said primly.

Amethyst cartwheeled in circled around Garnet. "More stops on the warp tour of that bad Homeworld network that Ja—ahh, that got unlocked before. And these two spots might be the baddest of them all!"

With a quick snap, Garnet grabbed Amethyst by the scalp, flipping and balancing the Quartz upside-down on her palm. "The first one is a warp pad that sent reinforcements to the Northern Front."

Excitement jolted through Connie, and she forced herself to remain still lest she disturb Pearl's brushing. "Northern Front?" she echoed.

Though Pearl's hand never hurried, the Gem's voice grew an excitement to match Connie's. "It was a battlefield even larger than where the strawberries grow. The fighting there lasted for centuries, a ceaseless clashing of armies that covered miles of land and sea! With Rose's healing, our side could rotate warriors in and out of the fighting and hold the line. Homeworld had to pour more and more soldiers into the fight to match us, to the point where they had multiple bases supporting just that one battle."

"We destroyed most of those bases long ago. But we missed one ancillary bunker deep underground," Garnet added. "That's the other site we're exploring today."

"An ancient battlefield where a bunch of Gems fought endlessly, or some boring old base too tiny for us to have found already? I know which one I'm calling dibs on," the upside-down Amethyst insisted.

The door to the bathroom opened, and Steven emerged, fully dressed. "We're splitting up?" he said. "I was listening through the door."

A sly look crossed Pearl's face as the Gem gently settled Connie's lustrous hair back over her shoulders. "Well, we seem to have an abundance of mighty Gem warriors now. No reason we can't be efficient with our patrols," she said airily. Then her expression quickly sobered, and she hurried to add, "But if you find anything, wait until everyone is together before doing anything rash."

Steven flashed a million-watt grin at Connie. "Hear that? We're mighty Gem warriors!" he cheered.

"'Careful' mighty Gem warriors," Pearl insisted. "Who stick together and don't take unnecessary risks!"

Connie felt a warmth glowing in her chest as she stepped next to Steven. Her hand brushed against his, and she suddenly felt even warmer. "Don't worry, ma'am. I'll follow your lead," she said.

"Connie is with me today," Garnet said, interrupting. "You three take the Northern Front. We'll check the bunker."

Everyone jolted at the sudden declaration. Steven almost seemed crestfallen as he said, "Wait, she is? How come?"

Garnet adjusted her visor. "It's my day to spend time with her."

That surprised Connie. She remembered the other Gems' promises to help her develop Jade's powers with more one-on-one training, but there wasn't exactly a syllabus to govern when those days happened. It was unexpected, but Connie knew that the precognitive fusion never did anything without a reason for it. "Um, okay. I guess I'm with Garnet," she said, trying to sound just as certain about it as Garnet had.

"Are you sure?" Steven asked. The question was aimed at Garnet, but his eyes flicked to Connie. The disappointment in his voice was unmistakable.

"I'm always sure," said Garnet. She flipped Amethyst right-side up and planted the Quartz atop Steven's shoulders.

Connie answered Steven's disappointment with an apologetic smile. "We'll see you guys when you get back. You can tell us about all the awesome carnage leftover from the battlefield."

Amethyst grasped Steven's hair from atop his shoulders and dug her heels into his ribs. "You heard her. Mush, Steven! Yah!"

Pearl followed the loud duo onto the warp pad. "Have fun, you two!" she called, giving Connie a wave and an encouraging smile before a warp tunnel lifted them out of the world.

Once the pad cleared, Garnet stepped atop it, and Connie hurried to follow. She felt like she had a million questions already, chief among them being, Why bring me along today? Surely the powerful fusion could handle a patrol on her own. But her last excursion with Garnet had taught Connie not to expect many answers.

"We're a little mad," Garnet had insisted, scowling at Connie after their summer house guest had unwittingly released Bismuth.

Connie cringed at the memory. Was Garnet still mad at her? It was hard for Connie to tell the difference between the fusion's normal terseness from her angry terseness. For all Connie knew, Garnet could be glaring daggers at her from under that mirrored visor.

But Garnet was still willing to give her a chance. Connie could still prove to the enigmatic Gem that she wasn't a total lost cause, doing more harm than good.

Be a Crystal Gem, Connie recited, and her wish list booked behind her eyes. Be a Crystal Gem.

So Connie kept a Garnet-like silence about her while the warp pad swallowed them into a tunnel of light.

The warp stream ended in a jolt only seconds later, giving Connie a split instant to cram her worries into her half-hollow where they belonged. A crystal floor jumped up to meet her shoes as the white tunnel vanished, and once Connie had blinked the spots from her vision, her mouth dropped agape.

"This is…" Connie breathed, hardly able to summon her voice.

"Not much," Garnet said indifferently.

A word like bunker had conjured images in Connie's mind of dark, cramped places, of filthy holes under concrete ceilings with only a hand-crank radio for connection to the outside world, with maybe a shelf of canned meals and bottled water to watch slowly disappear as days stretched into weeks stretched into years of desperate isolation.

But as with all other things, the Gems' architecture took matters into the opposite extreme of Connie's imagination. And then made them even bigger. And grander. And, somehow, beautiful.

Connie and Garnet had arrived on an enormous warp pad set into the center of a sprawling floor that stretched a hundred yards in every direction. The ceiling curved up and inward from those distant walls in the shape of a dome that rose higher than any building Connie had ever seen. The floors, the walls, the dome, all were tiled in huge squares of pristine white stone, the lines and joints of which she could barely see for their inhumanly perfect construction.

There were no windows or skylights to be seen. Obviously, Connie chided herself, since we're underground. Everything around them was lit with a warm, bright light, but Connie couldn't see any source of illumination, nor any shadows at their feet. The light simply was.

Yet there were spots of cool darkness in the bunker. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They honeycombed the walls and the ceiling, dark little spots that were perfectly matched with their oval shape and their exacting placement in lines and rows that followed the shape of the huge structure. And at the very top, a single black circle, much larger than the tiny dots of the other openings, leading upward to something unknown. It felt to Connie as though she had stepped into an immense marble honeycomb, one too massive for any living thing on Earth to have conceived.

Another comparison struck her, and she choked on the memory of dead, dry air. "It looks like the Kindergarten," she said. "All those holes…"

"Not a Kindergarten," Garnet said as her mirrored gaze traveled up the side of the dome. "Alcoves. Places where Gem soldiers could rest and collect themselves between battles."

Connie's stomach roiled as she turned, taking in the staggering number of those alcoves. They looked like tiny dots from a distance, yet each one had once kept a Quartz soldier inside. The size and power of such an army defied Connie's imagination. "W-Were there a lot of bases like this during the war?" Connie asked, stumbling over her words as her eyes kept tracking up and up and up the wall.

Garnet shook her head. "I don't think so. This one was too small for our patrols to find. Probably built after we found and destroyed most of their significant bases."

Too small, Connie's mind echoed in wonderment. An ancillary bunker. Her hair tossed back and forth as she shook herself violently out of her own overwhelmed imagination. Instead, she tried to focus on something smaller and more concrete, letting her curiosity fixate on a single point.

Frowning, she pointed up at the distant alcoves high above them, little more than specks that dotted the peak of the dome. "How did anyone get up there to use those alcoves?" she asked.

"Let's find out," Garnet suggested.

The walk to the floor's edge took several minutes even at a brisk pace. As they trekked, Connie's mind kept trying to fill in the missing pieces of their puzzling new discovery. Her feet scuffed across several tiles that she found were less immaculate than they had appeared at first glance. Deep scratches marred the stone, some places in long parallel lines, other places in gashes or skittering trails that had skipped and scored the floor.

What might have made those marks? Weapons dragged by exhausted Homeworld soldiers as they trudged home from a resounding defeat? Crystal Gems who had stumbled through the warp network into the bunker, only to fight to the bitter end surrounded by overwhelming forces?

By the time they reached the edge of the floor, those tiny dots in the wall had grown to be huge, Quartz-sized alcoves, little spaces that easily could have fit Connie's cot with room to spare. The alcoves were dark and cozy, and Connie couldn't help but imagine curling up inside of one with a stack of books, a blanket, and a flashlight to spend some time away from battle for some peace and quiet.

But the second row of alcoves were nearly ten feet off the floor at the bottom, and the rows upon rows of them stretched much higher. Some of them would have been almost perpendicular with the floor up near that large recess in the middle of the ceiling. Just looking up at them almost made Connie topple backwards from craning her neck.

"Do you suppose they jumped up there?" she asked.

In answer, Garnet stepped up to the wall between a pair of alcoves, then propped one foot up against its smooth white face. Then, impossibly, she brought her other foot up next to the first, settling both feet together on the wall and looking as though she were sitting on nothing at all. Garnet straightened herself so she stood on the wall, parallel with the floor, and took a few experimental paces up and down the space between the alcoves. She looked utterly unimpressed at having her world turned ninety degrees on its ear.

Turning to look back down at Connie, the sideways fusion said, "Adaptive architecture. Built so any Gem treats the wall like a floor. We could walk all the way up to the top like this with no problem."

Connie's disbelief burst into a thrill. "That's so cool!" she exclaimed. With only a moment's hesitation, she took a short run at the wall and jumped, lifting both of her feet to land flat against the wall.

Her shoes bounced and slipped off the white stone. Gravity took hold of her instead, yanking her into the floor, where she struck with a vicious thud.

Flat on her back, Connie struggled to draw back all the air that had been knocked out of her. "Ow," she wheezed.

"Maybe not 'any' Gem," Garnet admitted.

Her red face grew redder as Connie fought down her prickling shame. So much for not being a lost cause, she thought. Then she stuffed the thought and the embarrassment into her half-hollow and clambered to her feet.

When Connie had recovered from her rough landing, she and Garnet began to explore the perimeter of the bunker, leaving the wall and its alcoves alone for the moment. A new feature came into focus as they paced along the wall: a round platform, just a little too short to be a pedestal, had been raised out of the floor. Culled from that same white stone, the platform looked big enough for a few humans to gather closely, or more likely a single Quartz to stand above a throng of other Gems gathered at the base.

The platform was perhaps as high as Connie was tall, if not a little higher. An easy climb, if Connie were to hop and push herself up over the lip of the platform. But she saw a better opportunity to make up for her embarrassing jump from before.

This time Connie didn't let herself hesitate, and took off running at full speed for the platform. Steeling herself, she imagined a channel from her half-hollow that split and ran down her legs. Releasing just a little of the hollow's nastiness, she jumped for the distant platform.

Though her legs didn't feel any great push from the jump, the floor dwindled beneath her at an alarming rate, the lines in the tile vanishing into the distance beneath her. She looked up from her feet and grinned into the rush of the air cutting around her as she soared higher and higher in her first true, real, purposeful Gem Jump.

"Woo!" she shrieked, throwing her arms wide and letting her legs wheel in exhilaration.

Then she reached the apex of the jump, and that exhilarating thrill dwindled with her momentum halfway up to the dome's ceiling. Gravity caught her stomach and began to pull, drawing the rest of her into a drop-dead plummet toward the sprawling stone floor.

She clawed and kicked at the air, but her body only picked up speed. That freeing wind became a hard, biting wall of air that roared through her, plugging her ears to the sound of her own screaming as she fell. In the midst of her panic, the one good thought—an impossibly good thought in the middle of her demise!—was that her aim had been perfect, and her body would splat directly onto the platform far, far below.

Strong hands caught Connie around her ribs at the last second. She felt gemstones pushing into her sides as Garnet cradled Connie's plummeting into a wide swing and spin, easing gravity's momentum into a gentle swoop of the fusion's arms. She had gotten to the platform first despite Connie's head start and, in one smooth motion, deposited Connie safely next to her on the raised circle of stone.

Connie staggered, still fighting to catch her balance, and trying to put her stomach right-side up again. "Thanks," she said woozily. "I think my landings still need some work."

"Try doing the jumping part backwards when you're ready to land," Garnet suggested.

It was impossible for Connie to tell if the fusion was mocking her or not.

As the dizziness left her, though, Connie forgot all about her half a good jump and any mockery thereof. Somewhere above her quelling stomach she could feel a sensation remaining inside of her, something she hadn't felt when they'd first arrived to the bunker. The feeling went all the way down to her half-hollow. So, timidly, Connie reached out with her half-hollow to brush at that odd sensation.

The instant she did so, the air in front of them flashed with emerging rectangles of light. The rectangles hovered before them, stationary, while strange images began to play inside their boundaries. Colorful bar graphs appeared, then changed to pie charts, and then to columns and rows of strange glyphs. The images changed seemingly at random, lingering only just long enough for Connie's booking to register them before her conscious mind let them slip by.

Garnet frowned at the framed images floating in the air. "It's a—"

"—command station!" Connie exclaimed, suddenly understanding. "The Gems in charge would stand here, calling up information and giving orders to troops gathered around the platform so they could see and hear!" Then, realizing she had interrupted, Connie sank her head between her shoulders and offered a sheepish apology. "Sorry."

Garnet only nodded. Then tall Gem looked through the translucent displays to the far side of the bunker. When Connie did the same, she understood: there were similar platforms all around the edges of the immense chamber, spaced evenly, and far enough apart that a sizeable platoon could gather around each one to hear a different commander issuing instructions. An entire army could be mobilized in divisions using the array of platforms.

And again, Connie reminded herself, this was an ancillary bunker. A backup.

Less hesitantly, Connie poked again at that weird sensation with her half-hollow. One of the floating screens immediately descended to her eye-level in reply, and she beamed. When she touched the screen, she felt a semi-solid presence under her fingers.

Then she pushed harder, and her hand went completely through the screen. Yelping, Connie braced her other hand against the hologram and pulled, trying to drag herself out of its grasp. Pulling the hand back out felt like yanking her arm out of a sheet of quicksand, but at last, it popped out.

Now wary, Connie touched the screen more gently. In reply, it began lingering on one screen of data at a time instead of blinking from one to the next at random. When she swiped across the screen, it changed to a different page of information, one that her eyes couldn't understand but that her booking powers gobbled up hungrily. She swiped through pages, marveling at the walls and walls of Gem glyphs she couldn't read. "What does all of this say?"

Garnet had commandeered her own screen and had begun swiping through different pages of information more purposefully than Connie had. Her brows knit behind the rim of her visor, and her mouth drew tight. "It's Homeworld's deployment plan. Troop movements, battalion complements, supply lines, reinforcement schedules…"

"Is that bad?" Connie asked, worriedly studying the Gem's puckered face.

She watched the Gem's face tighten. "It doesn't matter anymore," she said, and quickly swiped through a row of screens that looked like maps and lists.

Connie hid her wince from Garnet, tucking her guilt down into her half-hollow. When Jade had still… When Connie had talked with Jade, the Homeworld solider had preferred talking about her glorious past rather than her terrible present. Even Pearl seemed to enjoy spinning tales about glory days on those ancient battlefields. But more than any of the others, Garnet seemed to live only in the present or beyond.

Maybe that's what happens when you spend so much time looking at the future, Connie thought. She would need to step more carefully around the subject if she were ever to start making Garnet like her again.

Finally Garnet's scrolling ended on a screen that looked like one of her father's work schedules. The implacable Gem's mouth unpuckered, and she said, "The warp pad's activity log. Before us, nobody had used it for thousands of years."

"Then, that's good? It means those other Gems haven't been here," Connie said cautiously.

"Right," Garnet agreed. But the Gem's visor lingered on those rows and columns of glyphs. Slowly, her eyebrows dipped back into the visor's rim in the barest hint of a scowl.

Part of Connie felt elated that she was finally learning to read the implacable Gem's expressions. The rest of her knew that anything worrisome enough to make Garnet frown would probably merit a freak-out from anybody else. "What is it?" asked Connie.

"This last activity is an evacuation list: hundreds of Gems warping out before the Diamonds intervened," Garnet explained. "But the log says they left a small squad behind to keep the facility secure."

Then Connie realized. The bunker was deep underground, with the warp pad being the only way in or out. And the warp pad had not been used since the evacuation. "They never left," she murmured.

Garnet summoned her gauntlets in reply.

Loosing a piece of her half-hollow's snarl, Connie pushed it up through Jade's gemstone. Light erupted beneath her chin, and she reached up to the collar of her V-neck shirt to catch the emerging sailcloth. The green fabric folded itself into a hilt fitted perfectly in her hand, and she swept the blade of her new sword out of the stone.

For tense seconds, nothing happened. Connie's eyes swept along the seemingly endless rows of alcoves all around them. All the while, her mind conjured worst-case scenarios. Maybe the bunker had been deep enough to protect its occupants from the Diamonds' corrupting influence. Battle-hardened Quartz soldiers could be lurking in any one of a thousand dark places around them, waiting to jump out of the walls and destroy their Crystal Gem intruders. With no need to eat or sleep, and with no sun to mark the passage of time, the Homeworld troops could have sat poised to repel an invasion for thousands of years, and might now be aching to close their insidious trap.

Glancing up at Garnet, Connie hissed, "How many Gems are in a—"

Garnet lifted her arms and slammed her gauntleted palms together. The air rattled with the sound of a thunderclap that echoed and bounced around the immense hollow chamber. Connie had tried to cover her ears too late, and pressed her fist with her sword grasped in it to the side of her head to quell a fierce ringing.

Somewhere far beyond the din of her own head, Connie could hear the sounds of…crumbling? Tearing? Breaking? Sounds of movement clattered inside the bunker, but she couldn't tell from where. Not until she saw debris tumbling out of the large, dark recession at the apex of the bunker's dome.

Something wet and yellow drizzled from the edge of the huge recession, seeming to take weeks to cross the distance from the ceiling to the floor, until it finally, finally spattered onto the tile near the warp pad. It was only droplets at first, until it became a broken stream, and then multiple streams, all gozzing onto the tile in viscous puddles.

Just as the drizzle began to abate, the first shape fell. It was brown and green in dappled stripes, large and round like a boulder, and it tumbled from the recession, plummeting straight for the floor. When it finally landed, it hit with a splat instead of the thunderous boom Connie had expected. The strange boulder stuck in place amidst the snot-like yellow puddles, its bottom flattening to settle beneath it until it looked like a little mound atop the white floor.

Before the first had finished splatting, more round boulder-like shapes fell from the recession to join it. One purple, one orange and white, and the rest of them muddy brown-green like the first one, each of them landing near the first.

With a shudder, the boulder-ish shapes began to unfurl, each one revealing arms and legs tipped with thick, deadly claws. Manes of wild hair clung to their backs, glistening with that same yellowy snot that had gozzed out ahead of them. Spikes jutted from their shoulders, heads, limbs, all haphazardly, so that no two creatures looked quite the same. They had no eyes that Connie could see, but as each one shambled to its feet, she saw their mouths stretch wide, revealing jagged edges that resembled teeth.

They were corrupted Gems, ones shaped almost exactly like the one Jasper had brought when she'd come to the beach house looking for a fight. Six of them. And their eyeless faces swung unerringly toward Connie and Garnet.

"…squad?" Connie finished lamely.

"That many," Garnet said, and lifted her gauntlets.

As one, the squad of corruptions took off barreling toward Connie and Garnet. The floor began to shake with the force of their thunderous approach as their jagged mouths opened in a chorus of howls. Ribbons of that viscous liquid flitted in their wake as they tore at the pair at full speed, claws gleaming, roaring, a stampede of massive bodies and sharp edges.

Connie tensed, fighting down the staccato heartbeat rising in her chest. Just one of those corruptions had been a tough battle even for a Gem as skilled as Pearl. Garnet might have more raw power and foresight on her side, but Connie didn't think the fusion was six times tougher than their other friends. Their backs were to the wall, and their only escape—the warp pad—lay on the other side of the corruptions' onslaught.

Her grip creaked on the rigid sailcloth hilt, and she lifted her sword to meet the charge. The sum of her fears vanished into her half-hollow, where they could fuel the powers left to her in Jade's gemstone. Everything else that remained in her was cold, and hard, and fierce.

Like a storm front, the corruptions reached the base of the platform where Connie and Garnet made their final stand.

Then the corruptions poured around the platform and kept running past the two intruders without so much as a glance. Their keening howls pitched high as they split apart, each one of them finding a different alcove at the base of the wall, where they dived in and huddled in the dark. The huge creatures trembled and whined, and pressed themselves as far into the alcoves as their massive bodies would fit.

Connie stared in bewilderment at the monsters cowering in the wall, and then up at Garnet. "What in the world could scare something as scary as them?" she said.

She sensed the air moving before she felt or heard it. Something deep inside of Connie registered a billowing gale emerging from the recession at the top of the dome, a stirring that brushed against the outside of her half-hollow in a way that felt alien but unmistakable. Then the rush of wind snapped her hair taut like a flag on a pole. Even Garnet's immaculate square fro wobbled in the intensity of it.

Turning, Connie saw the dark recession in the ceiling turn white with an emerging shape. Four long blades descended from the shape, each blade as long and wide as a speedboat's hull, and made from a gossamer translucent crystal. The blades stirred, then whirred, and the air shook with an earsplitting roar.

No. A buzz.

As the blades—wings—became twin blurs of motion, the rest of the shape dropped from the recession to hang in the air between the blurs. Spindly legs unfolded from a thick, chitinous thorax, which tapered and then ballooned into an even more bulbous abdomen that dangled underneath. Each of its six legs ended in a lethal point, almost identical to its stinger, which was longer than Connie was tall.

Its head bent, and it clicked a set of mandibles that were big enough to crush a semi truck. A pair of jointed antennae hung from between two enormous, faceted, crystalline compound eyes, glittering disco balls the size of hot air balloons that seemed to take in the entirety of the bunker all at once. Those eyes somehow seemed to zero in on the commotion that the other corruptions were making.

And Connie watched a white crystalline wasp the size of a private jet descend upon them, moving with a speed simply impossible for a creature so massive.

"Their boss," Garnet deadpanned above the roar of the wasp's wings.

Chapter Text

When Connie had taken up the sword, she knew every fight she faced would be completely unfair. She would be fighting against Gems, and the weakest Gem warrior was still stronger and faster by far than any human could ever hope to be. Her only chance of winning was to be skilled enough to make up the difference.

So Connie had trained. Footwork, timing, technique, she practiced it all until it became as natural a thing as breathing. Her body and mind were primed to take on any foe, no matter how mighty or terrible. 

But nothing in her training had covered how to fight a wasp as big as a private charter jet. 

Connie wanted to say something, anything, but her voice was a ghost in her throat. The creature before them was simply too big for her brain to comprehend as another living thing. Descending upon them, the wasp looked more like some kind of special effect from a cheesy science fiction movie come to life: Giga-Wasp, the Insect From Another World, or some other, equally corny title. 

The backwash from the corruption’s wings produced a hurricane gale as it swept low over the floor in a beeline at Connie and Garnet. The stoic fusion had to clutch her visor to keep it on her grim face as the creature approached. 

Deep inside of her, Connie felt that curious brushing against her half-hollow again, like she had before when standing on the command platform. In her reeling mind, she remembered other times when she’d felt something similar: a breeze drifting off the ocean, or the blowback from an especially volatile air grenade, or the splitting air that rolled off of a saber in mid-battle. In the buzzing gale of the Giga-Wasp, the sensation was much, much stronger, almost impossible to not notice even through terror. Whatever that feeling was, it resonated much more strongly beneath those tempestuous wings. 

Then, in the split instant it took for Connie’s racing thoughts to process all of that, she watched the Giga-Wasp roar overhead, moving past her and Garnet without a second glance.

The deafening buzz ceased in an instant as the Giga-Wasp landed. Its spindly legs somehow cradled its tremendous, chitinous bulk as it stepped nimbly to where the wall met the floor, where the other still-massive-but-not-kaiju-sized corruptions were cowering in their darkened alcoves. 

Tilting its whole body forward, the wasp craned down to one of the lowest alcoves. Its spindly forelegs, too big to even fit in the alcove, pinched and prodded at the opening with the very tips. Finally, it caught a thick limb and pulled the corrupted Quartz beast out of its hiding place. Chips of stone welled up beneath the beast’s claws as it scrabbled to hold onto the edge of the alcove. But in the end, the Giga-Wasp yanked the beast out and pinched it delicately between its forelegs, lifting the smaller corruption to its faceted eyes to get a better look.

Connie watched in awe at the almost loving way the Giga-Wasp handled the much smaller beast. “Is she taking care of them?” Connie asked in a hush.

Then, too fast for the eye to follow, the Giga-Wasp stuffed its quarry between its mandibles and swallowed it. The corrupted Quartz disappeared down the wasp’s gullet with one last fading scream.

“Nope!” Connie squeaked, jerking backwards. “So much nope!”

Even Garnet’s stony façade cracked as she watched the Giga-Wasp pluck and devour another of the cowering Quartz beasts. “Warp pad,” she uttered.

“Yup!” Connie agreed, already running.

Even with a head start, Connie watched Garnet catch up and pass her in the race back to the pad at the center of the bunker. The way back felt so much longer with mortal peril looming behind them, but Connie kept pumping her legs as hard as she could. 

In the achingly long seconds it took to run to the center of the dome, Connie couldn’t help but notice the sound of the struggling corruptions behind them falling silent. 

A dozen steps from the pad, where Garnet stood poised to warp them both to safety, that silence gave way to a deafening buzz. Fierce winds pushed at her back, staggering her onto her knees atop the hard stone as her hair billowed into her face. Panicked, Connie rolled off her stomach and stared upward, and cowered at the sight of the Giga-Wasp in full flight above her.

“No!” Connie screamed, thrusting out her hands and squeezing the air.

“Don’t!” Garnet cried.

The warning came too late, as Connie realized that the Giga-Wasp hadn’t even noticed her, but had instead simply been flying back to the recessed chamber at the center of the ceiling. But when an air grenade puffed against its faceted eye, the tremendous corruption twitched. It looked down

Then the Giga-Wasp dropped. Connie’s mind screamed to run, but her body was frozen in abject terror.

A shove from behind sent Connie sprawling across the floor. She bounced hard out from beneath the Giga-Wasp’s mandibles, feeling the tile shudder as she tumbled and stopped a dozen yards away. 

Once her eyes stopped spinning, Connie looked back, and her heart seized in her chest. “Garnet!” she screamed.

The fusion, who had pushed Connie clear of danger, now hung poised between the mandibles of the Giga-Wasp. Garnet’s gauntlets were braced against the mandibles’ tips, straining to keep its mouth apart as the wasp lifted her off the ground to swallow her whole.

Even as Garnet’s body trembled with the effort, her face remained implacable. Her visor glinted as she looked down at Connie and yelled, “Go back—”

Reaching up with both forelegs, the Giga-Wasp stuffed Garnet deeper into those crushing mandibles. The Giga-Wasp gulped, and Garnet was gone.

Connie stared, her mouth agape. Then she shrieked.

The Giga-Wasp twitched at the sudden noise and aimed its disco ball eyes down at her. Hurricane winds rose up across the floor as the wasp’s wings blurred, lifting the creature’s bulk off the floor to loom above Connie. Mandibles clacked hungrily, the sound of them like stainless steel drums crashing together above the deafening bzzz in the air.

Connie ran.

Her legs flew underneath her in a dead sprint, her arms pumping and her hair streaming behind her. The floor barely registered with her feet, as if she weren’t even touching the floor. And all the while, her brain tried to make sense amidst the jumbled panic of Garnet got eaten, corruptions eat Gems now, how can Gems eat other Gems, why, and also Garnet got freaking eaten like a ¡Soy Delicioso! bar, only probably tastier, but still EATEN!

In the blink of an eye, Connie reached the wall. She dove into the first alcove she could reach and pressed herself flat against the back wall. Chest heaving like bellows, she watched the opening. Her eyes burned in the fierce winds buffeting the bunker wall.

Striped crystal carapace filled the world outside her alcove. It rose, revealing a stinger at the end, ten feet of glittering black death that ended in a needle’s point. The stinger raced tip-first into the alcove, and Connie screamed again.

The whole bunker seemed to shake as the Giga-Wasp slammed its stinger into the wall, its abdomen cramming the weaponized protrusion in as deep as it could. Rock dust seeped from the edges of the alcove opening where crystal carapace grinded to push the stinger deeper to plunge it into Connie’s chest.

Connie shrieked, closing her eyes and flinching away from her impending death. But as she kept screaming, she couldn’t help but notice a distinct lack of impalement. Her screaming dwindled, and she risked opening one eye.

The wasp was too bulky to reach far enough. Connie could see the end of the stinger wriggling almost six full inches away from the tip of her nose, and no matter how the wasp struggled, that stinger just couldn’t reach any deeper.

For tense seconds, Connie kept watching the stinger tip, waiting to see if the wasp could squeeze those last few inches and actually kill her. Thankfully, that didn’t seem to be happening. So she let herself sink to the floor with a long, shaky sigh, careful to lie lengthwise along the back wall so the questing stinger couldn’t find her by luck.

The Giga-Wasp persevered for what felt like forever. Eventually, though, the huge corruption seemed to accept that it wouldn’t fit, or else it figured that the squalling creature inside the alcove actually had been skewered. In either case, the Giga-Wasp tiptoed back from the wall on those enormous spindly legs, and its white bulk vanished elsewhere into the bunker.

Connie held her breath for a long ten-count. When she was more or less sure the Giga-Wasp wouldn’t come back for a second try, she sighed again, and melted off the back wall into a puddle on the floor of the alcove.

Go back. Garnet’s final words echoed in Connie’s mind while she felt her heart rate ease out of the staccato timpani it had been. Go back? Go back where?

Go back to the wall and hide? Nailed that, Connie thought miserably. The whole point of them patrolling together had been to keep each other safe. And while Connie had expected safe to mean from Shard’s goons, today that had meant from a wasp that makes houses look teeny. And Connie had blown it.

Or literally ‘not’ blown it, she thought, and flexed her half-hollow. The air next to her bent inward and puffed out weakly in reply.

As she flexed it, her insides quivered with more of those strange feelings. These stirrings emanated from outside of the alcove in the wall. She could hear the Giga-Wasp in the distance, its wings buzzing intermittently as it seemingly investigated the rest of the bunker’s interior. But she also felt something in the movements, something that brushed deeply against the boundaries of her half-hollow.

The buzzing returned. The feeling came with it.

The buzzing stopped. The feeling stopped.

And Connie finally realized.

It’s the wind.

She pushed her lingering terror, all her doubts and anguish, deep down into her half-hollow. And then, holding her breath, she strained, and really, truly listened to the emptiness inside of her.

The wind touched her half-hollow in a way she’d never truly unpacked. It wasn’t the stirring of air on skin, or the bite of wind blowing all the way to the bone. This was the color of a summer breeze. It was the taste of the jet stream, the pirouette of bubbles on their way to the surface of a pond. 

Connie sensed the wind with her half-hollow. She touched it, listened to it, so hard that she forgot to breathe until the burning in her chest made her gasp. And as she inhaled, she  luxuriated in the sensation of the air filling her lungs, swirling inside of her body. The little eddies and wisps formed by the contours of her alveoli were as intricate as knitting, a thousand-thousand little strands that combined to form a single breath.

As she exhaled, she reached out with her half-hollow, brushing its reach through that breath, and felt that sensation tickling against the hollow’s edge. And she couldn’t help but laugh.

The wind! She could feel the wind!

Ever since she’d discovered that hollow inside of her, she’d been wracking her human brain for ways to use the gemstone’s powers, to push and pull at the air. And the best she had managed so far was to squeeze the air in her metaphorical hands like a toddler playing with fistfuls of mashed potatoes. Because she hadn’t been listening. 

She listened now, pushing the snarl of her half-hollow out as far as she could. It traveled much, much farther than she ever could have imagined, until she could sense the slow recirculation of the bunker’s atmosphere brushing against the far wall of the dome. The gentle current of air had been moving more or less the same for millennia. But now she could feel something breaking that ancient current.

Great, flat wings beat at the air, buzzing up a gale that rushed across the floor in bursts. A huge body moved, displacing the air in rolling sheaves that brushed across thick chitin. 

She reached for that rolling air with her half-hollow. Only this time, instead of pushing at the air, or mashing it, or yanking it, Connie teased it along its natural path, urging it along faster. 

The slow air began to quicken. She felt the rushing airstream stretch and bend under her distant touch, then felt more air rush in to fill the empty space left behind. As she kept the flow moving, her gale grew into a vicious wind tunnel that cut across the breadth of the dome.

Another light touch of her half-hollow bent the stream toward the source of that buzzing sensation. Still unseen at the back of the alcove, with no line of sight, Connie steered the airstream into the buzzing sound. The sound abruptly stopped, and a clamoring rose in its place, a pattering of enormous feet on the stone as the Giga-Wasp turned around to find the source of the disruption.

Slapping a hand over her mouth, Connie flattened her laughter into a slasher’s grin. Was this why Garnet had insisted on taking Connie along? Could the prescient fusion have seen this moment coming?

Go back...and fight?

Could that be what Garnet had meant to say?

The buzzing sound returned, even louder than before. Connie used her terror at the noise, plunging it through her half-hollow and then drawing it out as the hilt of a new sword. She swept the weapon from her neck, hopped out of the alcove, and resolved herself to test the possibility of Garnet’s last words.

When her feet hit the bunker floor, she saw the Giga-Wasp still circling its own stinger, the great beast looking for the source of the wind that had confused it. Connie’s eyes trailed down the length of the tremendous beast, lingering on its abdomen and the ten-foot-long stinger flickering as the tip. Somewhere, deep inside, Garnet was trapped. 

If she hadn’t been poofed in the chewing. Or shattered.

“Hey!” Connie bellowed, waving her sword. “Hey, ugly!”

Those boulder-esque disco ball eyes turned. Mandibles clanged like the jaws of a car crusher. 

Connie pushed out with her half-hollow. The air churned around the Giga-Wasp, spilling across the floor and snapping Connie’s hair like a flag in a tornado. 

“You like eating people?” she shouted, and threw out her arms.

The Giga-Wasp’s wings became a blur that threw the entire bunker into tempest. Connie’s eyes burned in the ferocious gale, her tears streaking back across her temples. Squinting, she could barely make out the sight of the corruption descending upon her.

“Eat this,” Connie growled, and flexed her half-hollow.

The wind beneath the Giga-Wasp suddenly changed direction. Instead of billowing out from those aircraft-sized wings, the backwash swirled up and over in a tight loop, and smashed down on the creature’s thorax. Connie’s half-hollow strained against the effort of redirecting so much wind at once, but it was a small feat compared to how hard it would have been to grab and push that much air on her own.

Blasted by its own wing power, the Giga-Wasp slammed down into the floor. The whole bunker quaked as eighty tons of twisted photomatter rushed at Connie, but she held her ground, her heartbeat pounding in her ears as she watched a wall of chitin rumbling toward her.

Just as Connie became certain she would be squished, the floor stilled beneath her. The Giga-Wasp’s slide dwindled, then stopped. Its glittering compound eyes rested a dozen feet from where she stood.

“...it worked. It worked!” Connie’s whoop of amazement broke her out of her shock, and she remembered what it was she’d been trying to do in the first place. She lifted her sword and, with a bellowing roar, rushed forward. 

Her folding blade struck right between those crystal eyes. The sword tip dove two inches into hard carapace before its resistance pushed back. Connie felt her shoes slide back against the tile as her weapon refused to budge another inch. 

“Oh, no…” Connie gulped.

She was pinned to the Giga-Wasp by her own weapon. The bunker wall lay far behind her, too far to run to with the corruption literally staring her in the face.

Go back…and get squished, seemed the likelier prediction in hindsight.

Her stomach dropped like a stone as the Giga-Wasp’s head rose. Connie had to let go of her hilt lest the creature lift her with it as it clambered atop legs as thick as telephone poles to loom over her. Its compound eyes glittered balefully, and its massive abdomen flexed, bringing the lance-long stinger down and forward to skewer its miniscule foe.

Connie yelped and threw herself sideways. The stinger darted past mere inches from her cheek, but the abdomen kept moving, slamming Connie with the stinger’s base and bowling her ten yards across the tile, where she fell in a tangle of limbs.

Woozily, Connie peeled her cheek off the floor. The slight motion felt like lifting a mountain. As her eyes focused, she saw a mass of white chitin descending upon her, and felt the backwash of titanic wings beating down upon her. Her brain was still too sluggish to react.

So Jade’s gemstone reacted in her stead. It took all of the badness Connie had fed it, all of the rotten thoughts and feelings, and it threw every single one of them at the Giga-Wasp.

The wind pouring down upon Connie suddenly reversed direction, hammering the Giga-Wasp’s underside with a hurricane gale. The corruption spun backwards into the wall of the bunker with a terrific crash.

That impact shook the floor like an ocean wave, tossing Connie off the tile. She landed on her feet already running. 

The Giga-Wasp had struck the bunker wall closest to Connie. Any other cubby hole would be too far for her to reach before the titanic insect could munch her. Desperate, her eyes latched onto the crystal warp pad at the heart of the bunker, and her legs pumped with every ounce of strength she had remaining.

She knew her running was pointless. Even if she made it to the warp pad, she wouldn’t be able to activate it. The ancient device would only respond to the command of a Gem.

But…maybe there could still be a Gem within her?

The half-hollow inside of Connie could feel the wind. Command the wind. It powered her air grenades. Imprinted data irrevocably into her mind. It wasn’t merely the absence of Jade, as she’d initially thought. It was Jade. Just…emptied.

That was why Connie could feel the movement of the air when she listened to the half-hollow. Jade was feeling the winds for her. And back in the Battle of Ascension, Jade had warped Connie and Steven to safety, with a little help on Connie’s part. 

Even gone, Jade was still protecting Connie. And all she’d asked for in return was…

…was for Connie to feel bad.

The half-hollow ran on her nastiest thoughts. It only seemed to respond to her when she focused on her guilt. It consumed her frustrations and gave her powers in return.

Well, then. Easy enough.

The floor creaked, and the deafening buzz of the Giga-Wasp filled the air again. Connie’s hair billowed forward over her shoulders. She didn’t need to look back to know that the Giga-Wasp was bearing down on her once more.

Splitting her focus, Connie let her legs do the familiar task of running for her life, while the rest of her concentration got to work. The beach house took shape in her mind: the kitchen, the living room, the loft, the temple door, and the bathroom too, all arranged around the crystal platform as though it were a dais. She even added a little metal cot next to the coffee table, her tiny contribution that had made the place her home.

Then she breathed life into the mental image, gently blowing all of the bad memories she had collected about the place since she had moved in. All of the times she had stood in the living room and felt out of place. All of the moments she’d watched the Gems flit in and out of the temple door like it meant nothing, while Connie trod in reverence up to the threshold of that ancient portal knowing she wasn’t welcome inside. 

Every power she’d failed to learn. Every tear shed. Every setback. Every pitying platitude Steven gave her when she failed. Every night she’d spent staring at the ceiling because the emptiness inside of her was too loud to let her sleep. Those were the feelings the gemstone wanted, and Connie filled her half-hollow with them until she thought it would burst. 

The buzzing at her back had grown unbearably loud. The hurricane backwash cut like a knife. She couldn’t help imagining that stinger lancing through her, turning her into a kebab.

With one last, desperate leap, her feet struck the warp pad. Her eyes squeezed shut, and she thought she could feel the stinger’s tip pushing at the back of her shirt.

“Now, jump. Jump!” Those had been Jade’s words during the Battle of Ascension. Back when Steven had needed Connie to save him, and Connie had needed Jade to save them both. So Connie jumped, not with her body, but with the gemstone.

For an instant, Connie feared that the stone had leapt out of her throat. Her hands clapped over it reflexively, and she felt the smooth, boxy shape of it still there. It was only when she heard her own sigh of relief that she realized the buzzing noise had stopped.

Connie opened her eyes and was dazzled by the pure, white light of warp space.

Her body reveled in the sudden quell of the Giga-Wasp’s droning wings. With gravity gone, she floated lightly, drifting within the luminous stream carrying her fast away from the underground bunker she and Garnet had been sent to investigate. She heard herself laughing, and felt tears bubbling out of her eyes to drift before her in little wet weightless globules.

When the warp came to an end, and she collided with the pad inside the beach house, her laughter and tears kept going. Because finally, finally, she understood.

“It’s Jade,” she wheezed, and clutched at the stone beneath her throat.

Since she’d discovered it that first night at the beach house, Connie had been operating under the assumption that the half-hollow in her was Jade’s absence: the metaphysical space that Jade had occupied in Connie’s thoughts and feelings. And that Jade’s gemstone had been responding to Connie’s very correct, very deserved bad feelings about it, as though the half-hollow were an intermediary between Connie and the gemstone. But that wasn’t the truth of it at all.

“It’s Jade. It’s literally Jade.” She laughed through the tears. 

Those feelings she had dumped into the half-hollow to try and fill it? Those had been fueling the powers directly all along. It was a small distinction, but it felt enormous to her in realizing it. Steven always talked about how his feelings were the core of his powers. Why would it have been any different for Connie? 

But it only seemed to respond to the bad feelings she fed into it. Did that mean Jade wanted her to feel bad? For letting Jade down? For failing her end of their deal? Or was it because those feelings inside her mirrored the ones Jade had been feeling when she–

“Stop.” Connie jammed the heels of her palms into her eyes until little starbursts filled her dark vision. Trying to guess a motive was foolish. Jade’s feelings and memories and voice were gone, but the gemstone remained. And for whatever reason, it ran on bad feelings. 

And that was okay. Wasn’t it? Connie had felt miserable for weeks and weeks since Jade had…left. If that misery had a point to it, a purpose, then it wasn’t bad anymore. Right?

Connie sat up on the warp pad, wincing at the twinge in her back. She wasn’t certain how long she had been lying there. The sunshine outside was still bright enough to suggest a late morning. But whether seconds, or minutes, or longer, it had been too long. Garnet was still in danger. Literally inside danger, in fact.

She dug her phone out of her shorts and hammered the screen with her thumbs, typing out a frantic text to Steven. But her thumb hesitated above the SEND key.

If Connie and Garnet had met with such peril at a little underground bunker, what might the others have found in their own mission? Pearl, Amethyst, and Steven had been going to an ancient battlefield. They could be fighting for their lives, or miles away from any warp pad or cell tower.

And besides, they still weren’t the reason Garnet had been devoured. 

Connie was.

Her teeth clacked together in a grimace as Connie shambled to her feet. Taking a deep breath, she centered her thoughts around a mental picture of the bunker, with its high dome walls, the pockmarked little Quartz cubbies, the crystal briefing platforms, and its soft, soothing lighting. Then she began to fill that picture with her memories: of how she needed to be rescued by Garnet from her own Gem jump, and how she’d turned to run, how she’d abandoned Garnet to an unknown fate inside the belly of a gigantic corruption just to save herself.

And when the picture was complete, she commanded the gemstone to jump.

A ringing chime lifted her out of the world and into a warp tunnel. As the ground fell away from her shoes, she felt a triumphant little laugh bubbling up in her chest. But she smashed the feeling down, squashing it underneath the hardened walls of her half-hollow and the heaviness inside of it.

Suddenly, feeling like a failure wasn’t just another thing to make her sad. It had meaning. It was fuel. And she finally knew how to use it.

As the warp tunnel ended and her feet met crystal once more, the gemstone flashed at her throat, producing a green corner of fabric. She jerked the cloth free and felt it fold into her sword as she whirled, lifting the fresh blade tracing a circle around her as she waited to be attacked.

Nothing. No buzzing. No clacking. No ginormous, impending death.

Her eyes plumbed the hundreds of little alcoves, as if the enormous corruption had somehow hidden her bulk inside. Then realization dawned on her, and she tilted her gaze up into the dark, circular recess at the top of the dome. A titanic shadow lurked high up in its depths…or heights, or whatever. Whatever that high chamber had originally been, it now served as the Giga-Wasp’s nest. Hive? 

Lair. Something that massive warranted a lair, she decided.

To have any hope of rescuing Garnet, or whatever remained of Garnet, Connie would need to face the Giga-Wasp in its lair. And though her Gem jumping had improved dramatically in such a short time, she didn’t think she could make a hundred-yard vertical leap. And no human could scale the walls up to the center of the dome, not even with the assistance of the alcoves.

She would have to do as Garnet had shown her, and use the adaptive architecture to walk up the walls. Like only a Gem could.

Legs unsteady, Connie tiptoed off the warp pad. Her eyes lingered on the deep recess in the ceiling. With every step, she wondered if the beast would suddenly drop down from its lair and devour her. Just the thought of it made her heart pound, and she felt the sensation thumping against the stone at her throat.

Is that all you are? she imagined Jade saying to her. Prey to be snatched? Food for a corrupted glutton?

“No,” she murmured. Tearing her eyes off the mouth of the lair, she set her sights on the distant wall. Her tiptoeing became a long stride, and then a full run. Her heart thundered even harder, but this time it wasn’t out of fear. 

Are you nothing more than a frightened human? the imaginary voice taunted her.

“No,” she huffed. She pictured the wind at her back as she sprinted. For a moment, she actually thought she could feel the wind pressing her from behind, carrying her faster and faster.

In no time at all, the honeycombed wall of the bunker sprawled in front of her. She fixed her gaze on a pale strip of wall separating two alcoves. Legs pumping, breath ragged, Connie rushed face-first at the looming edge of the dome.

Stupid. Weak. Useless.

She put it all into her half-hollow. Into the gemstone.

Worthless.

“No!” Connie snarled. She squeezed her eyes shut and jumped.

Her feet struck the wall together. With her eyes still closed, she held her breath, waiting to feel gravity yank her to the ground like it had before. When that didn’t happen, she peeked through one eyelid. Her sneakers were firmly planted on the wall. The floor was behind her. Ahead of her stretched the long incline of the dome wall, littered throughout with a thousand alcove pitfalls. 

Connie nearly jumped with excitement, but then thought better of it. Her smile hardened, her lips pulling back from her teeth, as she set her sights again on the deep recess far above. Tilting forward, she began to run, weaving along the thin paths between alcoves as she charged up the wall.

The wind rolled across her face as she ran faster and faster. A thrill washed through her as the sensations of the air moving across her body and billowing through her hair resonated in the empty gemstone. Her arms trailed like ailerons, her sword clutched tight in one hand. Far below, the floor loomed in a dizzying expanse, waiting for her to misplace a single step, as though somehow gravity felt offended that she was ignoring it. But she kept ignoring it, and locked her eyes on the dark lair waiting ahead. Vertigo would have to wait its turn.

After nearly a minute of sprinting, she skidded to a halt at the opening at the very top of the dome. Whatever effect held her feet in place, it neglected her hair, which hung in one long sheaf straight up…or rather, down. The sudden drop–or ascent, because upside-down fighting just has to be confusing on top of being dangerous –was a circular shaft that led straight down– darn it, up –into the ceiling. 

Panting for breath, she tested the sharp corner of the shaft in the floor-ceiling with one foot. The curved surface gripped her sole the same way the dome wall did. With a few more breaths to psych herself up, Connie threw herself down-up over the edge, swinging wildly around the corner across two planes of gravity, and fell facedown onto the wall of the vertical shaft. 

The recess went two hundred feet into the deep stone ceiling. Whatever unseen illumination was filling the dome, it didn’t reach the shaft, leaving Connie blinking in near darkness. Perhaps long ago, the shaft had served as some kind of command center, or maybe private chambers for whatever Gem had been in charge. It was impossible to tell, because every surface there had been coated in something smooth and semi-translucent, woven into an exacting hexagonal pattern that covered the interior of the pit in the ceiling.

And there, at the center of the pit, perched the Giga-Wasp.

At first, Connie held her breath, waiting for some reaction from the corruption. Its disco ball eyes seemed to be staring straight at her. She kept waiting for it to move, to lance its stinger through her, or turn her into a stain on the distant floor with one swipe of its long limbs. But it hung there, unmoving, from a thin pillar made from that same secreted material that comprised the hexagonal walls.

Is it asleep? she wondered. Certainly Gems didn’t sleep. The rules for corruptions, however, had never seemed clear or consistent. Did wasps sleep? She hadn’t gotten to that page in Ficklepedia yet. Something for later, if she survived.

With deliberate caution, Connie began to move. As she picked herself up from the wall, she felt a tacky sensation pulling against her skin, and she grimaced, resisting the urge to groan in disgust at the incredibly sticky, slimy feeling. She clambered to her feet and crept deeper into the pit, mindful of the uneven footing. She couldn’t tell how strong the hexagonal panes beneath her were, so she walked tightrope-like across the edges. 

The Giga-Wasp was so large that it took up nearly the entire shaft, so much so that Connie could have stood on her toes and brushed its carapace. Up close, its surface was smooth and glistening, almost mirror-like. Connie could see her own pale, warped reflection staring back at her in awe. If it hadn’t been trying to kill her so recently, she would have found the creature beautiful. 

Gingerly, Connie circled the interior of the pit, staring up at the Giga-Wasp’s darkened shape, and planning her next move. Somehow, she had to get Garnet, or Garnet’s poofed gemstones, out of the colossal insect. Her new sword hadn’t seemed to impress the Giga-Wasp much the first time she’d tried it, but no other ideas readily came to her.

Drawing a long, slow breath, Connie steeled herself for the course ahead. She would leap onto the Giga-Wasp, grabbing onto whatever part of its smooth carapace she could, and start cutting into it until it poofed or until she reached Garnet. In her mind’s eye, she saw the Giga-Wasp waking at the prick of the sword and bucking Connie against the walls of the pit, or taking off with Connie in tow to circle the bunker until Connie grew too tired to hold on, and slipped off into open air, spinning wildly until the floor reclaimed her for the last time. The thought was enough to chill her to the bone.

“Mmph…”

A soft noise from underfoot almost frightened Connie off the wall. She collapsed to her knees, clapping a hand over her mouth to hold in her scream. The translucent hexagon beneath her was darker than most, murky with some kind of bubbly syrup substance trapped beneath it. Shadows of motion flickered behind the surface, drawing Connie into a crouch with her sword held close to see what lay beneath.

As her eyes adjusted, Connie recognized the shape beneath the hexagon, and a breath of excitement chuffed from her lips. It was the outline of one of the Quartz corruptions she and Garnet had seen earlier, the ones fleeing from the Giga-Wasp. The hulking creature stirred, its claws twitching as though in a restless dream. Then it stilled again, nestling amidst the bubbles trapped within the viscous liquid.

Another shape flickered in the next hexagon over, and Connie slunk atop it to find another Quartz beast similarly trapped beneath. Slowly, she followed the row of hexagons down toward the mouth of the pit, finding a different corruption trapped in murky goo under each one. Each corruption had been sealed in the honeycomb wall, 

The last hexagon had a much smaller silhouette trapped inside. Connie squinted at it, confused, as it moved closer. The outline of a hand took shape in the silhouette and pressed against the other side of the hexagon, startling Connie. When she tried to yelp, the hand burst through the translucent material, clapping slimily over Connie’s mouth.

Garnet surfaced through the broken hexagonal seal. Her whole body dripped with slime, which stretched through the breach in a long, mucilaginous dribble. With her other hand, she lifted a finger to her lips in a gesture of silence, and then pulled her bejeweled palm from Connie’s mouth, drawing gossamer strands of slime as she did.

Wordlessly, Connie backed away as Garnet extracted herself from the chamber. The big fusion moved carefully, hardly making a sound as she slipped through the breach. Her afro sagged, sodden with goo, but she seemed otherwise unfazed by her imprisonment. She motioned for Connie to follow her and, together, they crept back down the edge of the shaft.

As Garnet helped her around the dizzying corner and up onto the dome’s ceiling, Connie whispered, “What happened? I thought you were eaten!”

“I was,” Garnet replied. She led the way down the side of the dome in a slow, quiet stroll. “She regurgitated me into the wall, just like the rest of them. Then she settled down. I was giving her time to get comfortable before I snuck out. When I saw you there, I assumed it was safe to leave.”

Connie’s threw a look of disbelief over her shoulder. Part of her kept expecting the Giga-Wasp to come charging at them. “We’re just going to leave them there? We aren’t going to poof them?”

“They can’t leave the bunker, and they won’t hurt anyone down here. No sense in starting fights we don’t need,” Garnet replied.

Shaking her head, Connie said, “Why did she eat you and the other Gems just to puke you into a wall?”

“They’re her squad. She’s responsible for them,” murmured Garnet. Her visor tilted toward the floor beneath them. “She’s probably done this for thousands of years: they get agitated and break loose, and then she swallows them and cocoons them back into the wall. In her state, this might be the only way she can think of to keep them safe. She probably mistook me for just another rowdy Quartz. I take it as a compliment.”

“Doesn’t seem like a very nice way of keeping someone safe,” Connie whispered, letting sarcasm drip from the last word.

“It’s as nice as she knows how to be right now,” Garnet murmured. 

Connie felt more questions burning inside of her, but she left them unsaid. The twinge of mourning in Garnet’s tone said a million times more than the taciturn fusion usually expressed, at least in front of Connie. 

Garnet’s visor tilted back, watching Connie follow the narrow path between alcoves. “Nice footwork,” the Gem remarked.

It took an extra second for Connie to realize what Garnet meant. And of course, as soon as she started thinking about how her feet were stuck to the wall, she looked up at the floor, and her concentration broke. She cried out as gravity took hold of her once more and jerked her into freefall.

Just as quickly, Garnet snatched Connie, grasping her by the hips to plant her back against the wall, and held her in place until the white stone gripped Connie’s sneakers once more.

“Thanks,” Connie said, her cheeks darkening with embarrassment. “Sorry you have to keep saving me. And sorry for…for messing things up. If I hadn’t attacked her, that big bug probably would have left us alone.”

“Maybe. But you didn’t know that,” Garnet said. 

“But I can’t just keep making mistakes like that!” Connie cried. “I blasted the Giga-Wasp! I went to the Moon without telling my parents even though I knew it would make them freak out! I let…” She choked, and then muttered, “I let Bismuth out of her bubble. Even though I didn’t mean to, I… What’s the point of me helping if all I do is make things worse?”

Garnet’s brow creased, and for a moment, the Gem didn’t speak. The silence made Connie’s stomach churn even more than the vertigo did. Finally, Garnet said, “Part of being a team is helping with each other’s mistakes. You’ve made some, and we have to deal with them.”

Connie’s stomach churned harder.

“But,” Garnet continued, “Steven, Pearl, Amethyst, and I have made even more mistakes. Probably with more to come. The important thing is that we try to make things right, together, and that we keep moving forward.”

“So, it’s silly to get stuck on something like blame? Or, like somebody maybe still being a little mad at you?” Connie squeaked.

“I was mad because I worried about you putting yourself in danger,” said Garnet. “Now you’re starting to show me that you can take care of yourself. So maybe I can worry less.”

The words had Connie grinning all the way to the floor, where she and Garnet hopped off the wall and back into regular gravity. But as they made their way back to the warp pad, a thought occurred to her, and Connie looked back up at the Giga-Wasp’s lair. “When you were getting eaten–sorry again, by the way,” she began.

“Forgiven and forgotten,” quipped Garnet.

“Why did you tell me to ‘go back?’ Did you mean, go back to the Beach House for help? Because when I got there, the others were still out on patrol.”

“No. I wanted you to go back to the wall and hide. I thought she might be too big to get you in there,” Garnet said as she stepped onto the warp pad. Then the fusion paused, tilting her head in confusion at Connie. “Wait. You said you went back to the house.”

Connie’s grin grew sly as she stepped next to Garnet on the pad.

The warp tunnel faded, depositing a smiling Garnet and a beaming Connie into a beach house filled with excited chatter. Pearl, Amethyst, and Steven were gathered in the kitchen, speaking animatedly, but fell silent when the chime of the pad announced the new arrivals.

“Connie! Garnet! You’re back!” Steven cried as he rushed to greet them.

“Hey, Steven. How was your…mission?” Connie trailed off, staring at Steven’s unusual face.

Steven touched the bright pink and white paint slathered over his features. The colors suggested the shape of something feline, complete with long black whiskers streaked across his cheeks. “You like it?” he asked of his facepaint. “At first I was thinking tiger, or dragon, but then I saw that they did lions too, and I asked if they could do one in pink. I bet Lion totally goes nuts when he sees it. He’s gonna love it!”

“Sure. Except, huh?” Connie floundered.

“Oh!” Steven started, realizing her confusion. “Right. So, that Gem battlefield we went to check out? Turns out it’s where New Amsterdam is now. Humans just bulldozed over any dangerous stuff, I guess. And the Homeworld warp pad is right in the middle of Bullseye Park in Empire City!”

Pearl joined them from the kitchen, tugging at a sash of fabric she wore draped over one shoulder. The words MISS EMPIRE CITY were emblazoned across the sash in bold, excited red lettering. “Humans built a big stage around the pad as part of an outdoor amphitheater, probably because they couldn’t move it. We warped right into the middle of some kind of political contest involving very impractical attire.”

“The beauty pageant was part of this big Empire Days festival they were holding in the park,” Steven explained. “Pearl really wowed them during the talent portion. Warping in was the best magic trick they’d ever seen!”

Pearl tugged at the sash with an embarrassed gesture. “I appreciate the thought, but I don’t have time to hold a political office so far away. Who would do the laundry around here?”

“And there were rides, and games, and stilt-walkers, and jugglers, and all kinds of cool events going on!” continued Steven.

Amethyst approached, grinning with a mouth and cheeks heavily stained in cherry red. “And guess who won the pie-eating contest!” she said, her breath thickly sweet.

“Nobody,” Steven said with a hint of reproach, “because someone ate all the pies before the contest even started.”

“Guess who ruined the pie-eating contest!” Amethyst corrected herself.

Steven shook his head, and his lion face split with a grin at Connie. “So what did you guys find in the bunker? Something dangerous? Something exciting?”

“Something for indigestion?” A heavy belch rattled Amethyst’s whole body. She thumped her midsection and groaned, “Oh, Steven was right. There really were no winners.” Then she burped again, and a half-chewed pie tin clattered onto the floor.

“Something messy, from the looks of it,” Pearl remarked at the pool of ooze slowly gathering under Garnet’s boots.

Connie blinked, wondering where to begin. She looked to Garnet, and saw the fusion being her usual implaccable self. Deciding to follow suit, Connie shrugged and said, “Nothing much.”

But Garnet rested a slimy hand on Connie’s shoulder. Surprised, Connie looked up and saw an encouraging smile waiting for her. “That’s not true,” said Garnet. “You should show them what you found.”

And then Garnet stepped off the warp pad, gently pulling Steven with her.

Standing alone on the crystal stage, Connie took a deep breath. Then, with a hop from Jade’s gemstone, the pad activated again.

As curtains of white light rose between them, Connie saw shock and delight erupt in Pearl’s and Steven’s faces. She smiled back, swallowing down all of the bad thoughts the gemstone had needed from her to make the warp pad work. Gem powers ran on feelings, and Jade’s gemstone wanted her to feel bad. But that didn’t mean she needed anyone else to worry because of it.

She would keep smiling, and keep the bad feelings down where they belonged, where they could do the most good.

Chapter Text

The dream ocean sprayed at Connie’s side, kicked forward by the winds she called to propel her. She skipped atop the calm waters, carried at truly dangerous speeds, grinning like a maniac while her sneakers bounced against the waves. With the wind at her back, she moved faster than any speedboat and more deftly than any jetski. And it had only taken five or six nasty wipeouts into the surf to get the hang of her new wind-skipping trick.

Under the unfamiliar night sky, countless books still floated in the ocean, their green covers made black in the starlight. By now, though, Connie knew what to look for, and could spot the covers jutting from the water with ease. What she wasn’t so good at yet was slowing down enough to grab a book while moving. Like riding a bike, wind-skipping seemed easier when she maintained some forward momentum.

She scooped up another volume and added it to the pile cradled against her chest. The last volume made the pile wobble, which made her body wobble as the wind picked her up again. So she pointed herself toward the shore and rode the spray back to the beach.

So many books were still in the ocean behind her. Yet Connie knew she was making progress, if only because of the many, many more she had recovered. Stacks of books filled the beach, stacks and stacks and stacks of them, clustered together into thick columns, each one resting on a blanket made from Jade’s sailcloth. The sailcloths dotted the beach in a haphazard array, combining to form a kind of strange maze with no start or end.

Connie calmed the winds and stumbled haltingly onto the beach. “Hey, I didn’t fall that time,” she huffed breathlessly to the stack in her arms. “Progress! Now, let’s find you a home.”

Back before she had mastered the Gem jump, Connie had been forced to make a new sailcloth whenever the stacks got a little taller than she was. But as the array of stacks grew to labyrinthian proportions, and she’d learned to jump, she had started building vertically instead. Each of the stacks had a tilt or a shimmy in its posture, but so long as she was careful with the wind, they remained upright.

One stack at the edge of her labyrinth still looked like it could hold a few more books. Squaring off the pile in her arms, Connie concentrated, then jumped. Her shoes cleared a dozen feet, allowing her to plonk the new books at the top of the stack before she descended gently back to the sand. 

“Ah, there we gooooooohhhh no, no, no, no, no!” Her satisfied breath became a cry as the now-tallest stack of books began to list toward her. Green covers rasped against each other as the books began to slide, tilting into a curved wave of paper crashing down on her. 

Desperate, Connie shoved against the stack, trying to right it even while volumes rained down on top of her. But all she managed to do was to shove the disintegrating pile into the one next to it, starting a cascade of the next three stacks. They in turn knocked into others, until one entire side of Connie’s labyrinth was spilling onto the beach. “NO!” Connie shrieked, pulling at her hair as all of her hard work fell apart in front of her.

A clattering of books spilled over Connie’s feet. Covers splayed open, pages ruffled and bent, the books lay spread across an almost mockingly large area. Connie groaned into her palms, unable to look at the hours of dreamwork undone in an instant.

“You were already on thin ice after that moon trip, gravity. Don’t push your luck,” Connie grumbled, and stooped to begin the cleanup.

Then she hesitated, and stepped back from the mess. The books themselves were jumbled together with no rhyme or reason, but the way the piles had fallen formed an odd pattern atop the sand. Instead of a broad avalanche, the books lay in a messy, winding series of curves and lines. Some of the lines crossed over each other, or curled around each other. It seemed so impossible that it took her brain an extra moment to recognize them:

DEAR CONNIE,

Her name. The books on the sand had fallen in distinct groupings of letters, spelling her name!

Connie.

Connie.

“Connie?”

Snorting, Connie jerked upright, hurtling out of her dream. The grit of sand became a prickling of green grass beneath her, and she blinked hard at a bright, sunny sky. She rolled onto her side and squinted, confused by the sight of an armored barn and a field of corn.

Lying next to her, Lapis propped herself up on one elbow to watch Connie wake. “Are you okay?” the blue Gem said. Concern lined her forehead. “Your face was asleep, but the rest of you was all twitchy and angry.”

Connie rubbed her eyes to jumpstart her memory. “Mmn, fella’slep?” she mumbled.

Lapis grinned. Hovering over the grass next to them, a large, oblong mass of water bobbed gently in the air. Little shapes circled the confines of the water glob, all traveling in a line. “You were talking about where you wanted to warp to first, and I went to ask Peridot to print out a bunch of those Gaggle maps for us. But when I got back, you were asleep. So I made these guys.”

The last of the sleep fell from Connie’s eyes, and she peered into the floating water. The little shapes swam closer to the water’s edge, revealing themselves to be folded paper Gaggle Maps printouts that had been transformed into origami fish. Connie grinned at Lapis and said, “You remembered how to do them! They look really good.”

Modesty darkened Lapis’s cheeks. “These ones were pretty easy. I still can’t get that crane you showed me to look right.”

“The crane took me forever,” agreed Connie. She watched as Lapis guided her line of paper fish through their no-walls fish tank. 

Once more, Connie marveled at how Lapis could move something inside of the water without disturbing the water at all. The current carrying the fish in their circle remained in perfect balance with the other water. There was a word for it, but for some reason, Connie’s booking power couldn’t fish it out of her head. It had to be something she remembered only in her fallible human meat, and not in the indelible memory of Jade’s gemstone.

“Anyway,” continued Lapis, “I let you sleep for a while. But then your phone went doodle-doot ! And I said your name until you woke up.”

Digging into her pocket, Connie checked her phone. The doodle-doot had been a reminder she’d set on her calendar. “Oh, crud! I’m late!” she cried, and scrambled to her feet. “Sorry, I gotta go!”

“Okay. But next time let’s skip the nap and go somewhere fun,” Lapis called after her, waving goodbye.

“Count on it!” Connie yelled over her shoulder as she ran for the warp pad.

The guilt of blowing off Lapis became handy fuel in her half-hollow, launching her into the warp tunnel. Sleep had taken a backseat to the tantalizing new whispers of Jade’s gemstone. Connie had lain awake in her cot all night, immersed in this new sense opened to her, feeling and listening and talking to the ocean breeze as it rolled inland. Now that sleepless night had caught up to her, and the unthinkable had happened: she was late for a lesson.

She touched down running on the pad of the Sky Arena. Immediately, she had to swerve to avoid bowling into Pearl, who stood primly at the pad. Connie’s duffel bag with her training gear dangled by its strap from Pearl’s upraised palm.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Connie cried. She bowed as she took the duffel bag from Pearl.

“It’s not like you to be late,” her mentor said in a carefully neutral tone.

More guilt flooded Connie’s face with heat, and she hurriedly stuffed the feeling into her half-hollow. “I was up late last night because… Sorry, I won’t make excuses,” she said, and knelt to fumble with the duffel bag’s zipper.

Only someone who knew Pearl as Connie did would have spotted the twinkle of amusement in the Gem’s eye. “Good,” she said. “Then we can make up for lost time.”

A flicker of motion teased the edge of Connie’s vision. Her instincts took hold, and she dove away from the bag an instant before three translucent spears bounced off the stone floor where she’d been standing.

A trio of Holo-Pearls clung to the spiral pillars near the ceiling of the Arena’s entrance. The nimble projections dropped in unison, landing and collecting their weapons before Connie had even regained her footing. Their blank eyes fixed on Connie, and their spear points moved in vicious harmony.

Connie’s shock honed itself into a wicked grin. She tugged at the collar of her T-shirt to give her sword’s hilt room to emerge. A dark thought pushed the weapon from her chest, and she swept it up to knock aside a spearhead aiming to skewer her. “A surprise attack? That’s not fair!” she laughed.

“Don’t humans think rules are made to be broken?” Pearl teased. As Connie began a fighting retreat up the stairs and into the Arena proper, Pearl followed at a jog. Her mirth evaporated as she hastened to add, “Which is, of course, ridiculous. Rules are very important. There just aren’t many of them on the battlefield.”

The green blur of Connie’s sword struggled to keep three Holo-Pearls at bay. While her hands and feet moved on reflex, Connie marveled at the sensation of the air as it split around their weapons. Jade’s gemstone let her sense the vortices swirling off of the holographic spears. Every parry, thrust, counter, and dodge stirred the cold, thin air. The extra sensations proved to be wonderfully distracting, which the faux Pearls took fully to their advantage.

“This feels more intense than normal sparring. Is it a lesson in humility?” Connie panted.

“Not intentionally,” Pearl said, while her doppelgangers worked to turn her student into a pincushion. “Today we’ll work on your ability to control a battlefield through positioning. Tell me, how do you fight multiple opponents?”

“You don’t,” Connie recited, her words emerging as grunts between swordstrokes. “Turn the fight into one-on-ones, denying the other opponents any opportunity until you’ve defeated each one in turn.”

“And how do you do that?” Pearl prompted her.

The fighting had backed Connie into the middle of the floor. There, her trio of opponents surrounded her, using the longer reach of their spears to box in Connie. “Badly?” Connie squeaked.

Pearl shook her head. “Remember, when you’re defending, you control the direction of the fight. Your opponent must move at you to attack, but you can choose where you move in reply.”

Connie purposely left her back to one of the Holo-Pearls for a second too long. The Holo-Pearl took the bait, stabbing at Connie with a downward thrust. Half a heartbeat behind the first, the other two holograms moved in to flank Connie into the attack.

Feigning a block, Connie ducked low. Her sword hooked behind the head of the descending spear, and she pushed herself against the attack, sliding across the cold tile through the stabbing Holo-Pearl’s wide stance. All three Holo-Pearls had to break off and separate, lest they crash together in a Looney-Tunian pile-up.

“Excellent!” Pearl cried while Connie whirled back to her feet. “Use their numbers against them! Force their lines of attack to cross!”

As her opponents recovered and separated, Connie had a second to consider Pearl’s words. Two of the holograms moved to flank her again, while the third came at her directly. Pearl’s doppelgangers were strong and fast, like their creator, but lacked any of Pearl’s creativity. Which, Connie realized, was the point of the exercise, and her biggest advantage.

The air cut against her face as Connie broke left and charged one of her flankers. Her arms shook as she slammed her blade into the shaft of the translucent spear. Clang!

Behind her, the other two Holo-Pearls moved in to trap her again, too quick for Connie to make another attack. They were all but upon her, with the third one spinning in a counterattack, when Connie leapt straight up. Three spears jabbed uselessly beneath her as Connie Gem-jumped backwards, sailing over the pair of flankers.

“Yes!” cheered Pearl. “Draw your enemies to where you were, and put yourself where you’ll have the advantage!”

Displacement . Her mind dredged up the word unbidden while Connie sailed high across the Arena floor. One thing leaves, and another replaces it. A swordswoman moves, and a spearwoman takes her spot .

That had been the word she couldn’t think of moments ago on the farm. Just like Lapis’s paper fish underwater. The spritely blue Gem had moved the water around the fish, and had to move other water to replace that water, making a closed circuit of current that didn’t disturb the body of water itself. Ocean currents were, in essence, water moving within itself. Examples of displacement, but on a tremendous scale.

Wind worked in a similar way. Rising and falling temperatures changed air pressure across huge areas, making warm air push against cold air, as the whole atmosphere of Earth pulled and stirred in a constant game of displacement.

And within the reach of Jade’s gemstone, Connie controlled air pressure. 

As Connie’s toes made contact with the floor again, her hair fluttering around her shoulders, she watched the trio of holograms chase after her. Thanks to Jade’s gemstone, she could feel them pushing through the air. The way the currents spilled around their translucent bodies fascinated Connie, so much so that she almost forgot that they were coming to thrash her.

A push with the gemstone gapped the air in front of one Holo-Pearl’s foot, creating a low-pressure pocket that sucked the foot forward. The Holo-Pearl staggered with a bad step as its foot jerked ahead of its stride, and it fell behind the charge of the other two holograms.

Connie smiled, but only for an instant. A real Jade could lift buildings off of their foundations. Compared to that, tripping a hologram was a paltry feat. You can do better, an imaginary Jade told her.

She stuffed that disappointment into her half-hollow, and Jade’s gemstone came alive. This time, as Connie gripped the air again, she wrestled the pressure at either side of the two lead Holo-Pearls. The thin atmosphere stretched and expanded, like air-grenades in slow motion, teasing more air around it into pouring sideways to fill the empty space she’d created. In response, the air erupted with a crossways gale that threw one Holo-Pearl into the other, knocking them both into a tangle of limbs that rolled past Connie on sheer momentum.

A cheer of approval came from Pearl’s direction, but Connie didn’t have time to glance back at her mentor. Her sailcloth sword flashed in a green arc, slapping aside the spear of the trailing Holo-Pearl she had tripped before. The hologram pressed its attack with a blur of strikes, each one growing closer and closer to piercing Connie.

Her mind raced even faster than her blade. The whole point of the exercise was about positioning through displacement. Maybe Connie could make that even more literal than Pearl had intended.

Connie’s ears popped as she shifted the air pressure sharply. With a little hop, she let the massive pressure drop pull her backwards. The air sucked her back only a few feet, but the sudden gust pulled her holographic opponent along with it. Unprepared as it was, the hologram staggered, losing its footing. Its spear barely met Connie’s folding blade in time to save itself. With a few deft strokes, Connie’s sword drove the Holo-Pearl back, pressing an attack while the other two holograms were untangling themselves somewhere behind her.

Barely acceptable, even for a human, she imagined Jade sneering. And the thought wasn’t wrong: it was taking every ounce of effort she had to move the air in just the little amounts she already had. This new displacement thinking worked better than when she had been clumsily pushing at big masses of air,  but it wasn’t better enough. Each new pressure change took too much energy and concentration.

One of the Holo-Pearls proved the point, rushing Connie with a mighty thrust of its spear. Connie’s block sent her spinning away from the hologram. She caught sight of the other two Holo-Pearls gathering again to overwhelm her once more.

A memory surfaced in Connie’s thoughts, distracting her while she mapped out her next strategy. “Use your construct of the river. Picture that, but outside of yourself," Jade had said. "Make the river into a circle. Now imagine the river stretching into itself, like a rubber band hooked on a nail and drawn around the circumference of a wheel.”

During the Battle of Ascension, Jade had helped Connie create her very first wind blast. The gale had been powerful enough to blast Pyrite across the sprawling terminal. Moving that entire system of air, a long, huge circle of air that Jade had helped her craft, had been far more powerful than any of Connie’s solo efforts. 

So Connie imagined a similar circle, one that surrounded her in a tight ring. There was plenty of frustration in her for fuel, and Jade’s gemstone did the work, coaxing the air into motion. 

The wind started as a lazy gust, but quickly picked up speed. In just a few seconds, Connie had created a cyclone with herself in the eye of the storm. 

Her holographic foes hesitated at the edge of the cyclone. Their facsimile sashes cracked in the fierce wind, and their spear tips jerked hard as they prodded toward Connie, testing their path of attack.

Connie expected the cyclone to sap her resolve immediately, giving her a moment at most before it fizzled. However, the effort to keep the cyclone going was far less than it had been to start it in the first place. With a little constant push, she kept the cyclone spinning faster and faster until it howled in fury, forcing the holograms back even farther from the expanding wall of wind.

Obviously. Momentum takes less energy to maintain than the initial motion does. She couldn’t tell if the thought was her own inner voice or that of her imagined Jade. Either way, it was snarky, but correct.

Quickly, though, the cyclone reached its peak velocity. As she tried to spur it faster, she felt her hair kick up in the shrinking safety of her storm’s eye. The thin air grew thinner, and her lungs started to ache. Tireless, endlessly patient, the Holo-Pearls waited outside for Connie to exhaust herself. Which would happen soon, because Connie felt herself struggling to keep the rushing air confined to such a tight ring.

But what happens if I just let it go?

Gathering up one last push, Connie took the last of the safe air around her in the eye, then shoved it outward to break the circle of the cyclone.

Her wind construct exploded. A hurricane gale burst out from where she stood, blasting the thin air in a spherical wave. Dust and rocks littering the tiles were swept into a wall of debris that blasted the floor clean.

All three Holo-Pearls took the wall of air head-on, and were blown off their feet, tumbling high into the sky and far out beyond the edge of the Sky Arena.

So, too, went the non-holographic Pearl.

Connie watched in horror as her cyclone bomb blasted Pearl into the sky. The graceful Gem spun wildly, crying in alarm as her arc carried her across the Arena to its far edge. “Pearl, no!” Connie screamed. 

Abandoning her sword, Connie sprinted for the edge. She tried to gather another airburst to push Pearl back toward safe ground. But her half-hollow lived up to its name, aching emptily in the wake of her cyclone. She’d used up everything she had on the flashy experiment, and had nothing left for so much as a feeble gust. 

As Connie dived toward the edge, she saw Pearl trying to right herself in midair. The pale Gem stretched her hand for the broken end of the Arena. Connie reached with everything she had, pushing herself over the edge until she nearly teetered over and fell herself.

Their fingertips passed within inches of each other.

Then Connie watched Pearl disappear into the clouds below the Arena. Her last sight of her mentor was a look of shock and dismay twisting in Pearl’s frightened face.

“No! NO!” Connie screamed. She fell limply against the tile, staring at the divot in the clouds where Pearl had vanished. Tears poured from her eyes to fall over the edge like rain.

She had killed her mentor. Her friend.

For the second time, Connie had killed a Gem who meant the world to her. All because she hadn’t been thinking.

Distantly, she heard her cell phone ringing in her pocket. A desperate surge of hope sent her hands fumbling for the device. Could it be Steven? Was there something he could do to help? She nearly dropped the phone over the Arena’s edge as she answered the call, unable to read the caller’s ID through her tears. “Hello?” she cried.

A fierce crackle erupted from the speaker. Then, through the thicket of noise, she heard Pearl say, “Hello? Connie?”

“Pearl!” Connie sobbed in a moment of relief. But that quickly vanished, and she stammered, “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean—”

Pearl seemed to have difficulty hearing her over the sounds of rushing air, as she shouted over Connie’s apology. “When your mother gave me her phone number for emergencies, I thought it would be a good idea to get a phone so I could use it,” she explained. “Greg purchased one for me. I have six contacts now, and you’re one of them!”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Connie shouted the words into her phone. If she had killed Pearl, even by accident, she needed the Gem to hear her apology before she shattered into a million pieces on the ground.

“No, don’t be sorry! You just caught me off-guard, that’s all. Clearly, I’ll need to factor your new powers into our lessons,” Pearl shouted back.

“But…you’re falling!” Connie sobbed. She knew from experience what a terrifying fall that could be. When Stevonnie had been knocked off the edge and unfused, it had felt like a nightmare to see the ground hurtling up at her. Only a last-minute re-fusing and some deft floaty powers had saved them from a splattery fate.

“Oh, it's not the first time I’ve been knocked over the edge,” Pearl laughed. “Must’ve happened seven or eight times before. At worst, I’d poof if I landed on a sharp rock, but we cleared those below the Arena ages ago.”

“You…You’re going to be okay?” Connie whimpered, hardly daring to hope.

Of course Pearl would land safely. She was a real Gem. 

Not like you.

“Connie? It’s going to take me hours to reach the nearest warp pad,” Pearl crackled through the phone. “Let’s end practice early. Go do something fun.”

“I…” Connie started to recriminate herself, but stopped. She could make herself do drills for however long it took Pearl to jog to the nearest accessible warp pad. But disagreeing with Pearl after flinging her off the Sky Arena seemed like doubling down on her mistake. “Yes, ma’am,” she sniffled.

“Whoops! I have to let you go now. The ground is coming up fa—”

The call disconnected. Connie sat hunched over the dark screen, wiping the tears from her eyes with a fist. Go do something fun, Pearl had instructed her. 

Just the thought of having fun after such a blunder made her half-hollow itch. She quieted the emptiness by feeding it her guilt. Wobbling to her feet, Connie resolved herself to have productive fun. And she had an idea of where she might start with that.

After all, if she couldn’t fix her mistake with Pearl, perhaps she could work on correcting an earlier mistake instead…

Chapter Text

Thunder rumbled across the mountainscape. The sulfurous air was rarely silent. It whistled through crags and around jagged peaks. In times of eruption, the air shook with a roar heard once across centuries at a time. Even the rain came on occasion, bringing thunder to boom over the brutal lands.

But never before had the mountains heard thunder booming to the tempo of Shave and a Haircut.

Connie stood outside of the solid slab doors of Bismuth’s forge and shook the air for ten straight minutes. Jade’s gemstone gripped the murky sky above her in huge gulps and squeezed it into pinprick motes, then let the air explode. The sensation of her air grenades quaking and reverberating high overhead tingled in her half-hollow. Resonant patterns of sound and wind became a kind of music all their own, playing beneath the raw sounds of the artificial thunder. 

It hadn’t been hard to warp herself into the mountains. Of all her many failures as a Gem ambassador-turned-carrier, that location loomed above the rest as the site of her most massive blunder. Summoning up the dark feelings to carry her through the warp stream to the correct pad had been as easy as remembering how Bismuth had carried her, powerless, from the temple to the depths of her mountain lair. Only this time, Connie had come of her own accord, and to set things right.

At last, the staggered doors of the forge opened, and Bismuth marched up the stairs. The broad Gem’s hands were shaped into hammers, and she stormed out as if expecting the forces of Homeworld awaiting her. When she saw a single Connie instead, she paused, confused.

“Gusty? Was all of that noise you?” Bismuth asked.

Connie grinned in reply. Her hand rose to her throat, and with a dark thought, she grasped a fresh hilt and drew her sailcloth sword out of Jade’s gemstone. The motion made Bismuth’s hammer hands jerk reflexively, but Connie simply stood there with the blade held aloft. 

“So?” Connie said, turning the blade slowly for Bismuth to see. “Do you think this is enough to fill that hole inside of me?”

A smile crept into Bismuth’s face. Her hammers reverted into hands as she laughed and said, “It looks like a good start.” Then she started back down the stairs, motioning for Connie to follow her.

Down in the forge proper, Bismuth held out her hand in a silent ask. With a nod, Connie handed over the sword, and the smith turned it over, her enormous hands moving with careful, practiced delicacy. Bismuth’s lips pursed in a small noise of appreciation as her finger tested the edge. 

“I don’t think I could have made a better sword for you myself, Gusty. It didn’t look like this for the last gal who had your stone, did it?” said Bismuth.

It’s not my gemstone, Connie stopped herself from saying, tucking the words into her half-hollow instead. Out loud, she answered, “No. It used to be a sailcloth. Jade used it to glide on her winds.”

“Then consider me triple-impressed,” Bismuth said, lifting her eyebrows. “I only know one other Gem who changed her intrinsic tool into something new. I thought she was one of a kind, and it took her a whole century to manage it. You’re really something else, newbie.”

Connie blushed at the praise and accepted the sword back from Bismuth. The weapon dissolved into fading motes with her touch. “Thanks. How have you been, Bismuth?” asked Connie.

With her sword’s showcase complete, Connie turned in a slow circle to take in the state of the forge. The old array of weapons she had seen during her first visit were buried under a new collection of gleaming new armaments. Everywhere Connie looked, there were new weapons stacked in overflowing racks, or leaned against the wall, or simply piled onto the floor. The raw material bins kept near the lava stream were noticeably depleted. 

Connie’s reaction must have been obvious on her face as Bismuth coughed into her fist and said, “I’ve, uh, been keeping myself busy.”

“Have you been making swords this whole time?” Connie asked, incredulous.

“No! That would be ridiculous,” Bismuth insisted. “I’ve also been making axes, halberds, staves, glaives, spears—”

“Bismuth…”

“—shields, maces, bludgeons, flails, cleavers, daggers, war hammers, and sickles,” Bismuth continued. “Oh, and a spiked chain!”

“Bismuth,” Connie said slowly, “what’s going on here?”

The false cheer in Bismuth’s face cooled into a mask. Idly, she picked up a blade within reach. Her other hand morphed into a flat rod, and Bismuth began reflexively drawing the blade’s edge across her whetstone arm, honing it. “It helps me think. Plus, pounding on some steel keeps me from pounding on other…things,” Bismuth explained.

Connie was silent, listening to the low murmur of lava moving through the glowing veins of the room, and to the rasp of steel against Bismuth’s hardened body. They reminded her of the sounds of the empty beach house with its tidal heartbeat lapping at the shore, and the groans and creaks of the house settling against the breeze. Those were the only companions Connie had when Steven and the other Gems had left her behind to patrol. 

Those sounds reminded her that she didn’t really quite belong there.

“I think you need a break,” Connie said. “You need some time away from here. Maybe somewhere with more people than pikes?”

Bismuth laughed. She finished her sword with one decisive stroke across her arm, then tossed the blade aside carelessly. “No offense to half of you, but humans and I don’t have much in common besides a love of weapons. Unless that’s changed in the last few millennia?” she said.

Herself an admitted sword aficionado, Connie said, “Not as much as it should have.”

The smith grunted in understanding. “And I’m not ready to talk to the others. Not yet.” Her hands clenched, creaking with audible tension.

But Connie didn’t despair. She had come prepared. “What if I could introduce you to some different Gems?” she suggested.

Bismuth raised an incredulous eyebrow. “Like those Shard goons you told me about? I could go for some guilt-free brawling.”

Connie shook her head. “No, we still haven’t found them. I actually had someone else in mind…”

As the white light of warp space fell away, a wave of warm, thick air rushed over Connie and Bismuth. A sunny day beamed down on them from clear skies, and a pollen-sweet breeze rustled through fields of tall green corn stalks.

Bismuth turned slowly on the warp pad to survey the farm. A look of wonder dawned in her features.” Is this how they’re building structures now?” she asked, staring at the barn and its haphazard scrap armor plating. “I like it! Looks sturdy.”

From through the barn doors came a peal of barking. Pumpkin barrelled out of the armored building, running in circles as she seemed stuck between being excited about Connie’s return and being alarmed at the sight of the huge Gem who had arrived with Connie. 

Peridot emerged, following after the gourd with a rolling garbage can drone at either side of her, the so-called campers she had built to protect the farm. “Pumpkin, for the last time, you’ll never reach that sparrows’ nest on the roof. You broke that jetpack I made you, and I just don’t have the resources to build you another.” The little engineer seemed annoyed with Pumpkin’s hollering, but stopped short when she saw the pair on the warp pad.

“Hi, Peridot!” Connie called, waving. “I—”

“Oh, my stars! RED ALERT!” Peridot screamed. She dove behind her campers, who trundled forward into a two-can phalanx. The lids of their cans lifted to reveal spinning red lights that flashed in time with a loud, obnoxious klaxon blaring in stereo from the pair. “Connie Jade has been compromised!”

Bismuth shot Connie a confused look, which Connie could only answer with an equally confused shrug.

The campers rode their caterpillar treads up to the far edge of the barnyard, followed by Peridot and the barking Pumpkin. Their klaxons mercifully fell silent, and their lights retracted, replaced by crackling dissipator tines. “It’s okay, Connie Jade. I know you wouldn’t bring the enemy here willingly. If you’re shattered in the crossfire, you will be remembered with honor,” Peridot shouted from behind her drones.

“No, Peridot,” Connie tried to interject.

“Hey! You!” Peridot bellowed, rising on tiptoe to glare at Bismuth over the lids of her campers. “If you think one Bismuth is all it takes to conquer our farm, you’re hilariously mistaken!”

“Peridot!” cried Connie, exasperated.

But the diminutive Gem would not be cowed or corrected. “This whole area is mined! Take one step off that pad, and you’re finished!”

“Really?” Bismuth grinned from ear to ear as she reached into her apron pocket and produced a short, simple iron dagger. With a casual flick, she tossed the dagger across the yard, landing it halfway between the warp pad and Peridot’s battle line.

The instant the dagger touched down, a loud bang exploded, like the rapport of a large champagne bottle being uncorked. Something golden and translucent geysered out of the dirt, enveloping the dagger. Then the spray hardened, solidifying into a gloopy column of amber glass. Bismuth’s dagger hung trapped inside the column, its silhouette dark against the sunlight filtering through the translucent material.

“Ha! See that?” crowed Peridot. “That’s gloop! It’s as hard as stone, completely biodegradable, and fast-acting! And you’re surrounded by it! Your pitiful invasion is meaningless in the face of my preparations!”

“Oh, I like her,” Bismuth told Connie.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Connie sighed and said, “Peridot, this isn’t an attack. I wanted to introduce you to Bismuth. My…friend?”

When she looked up questioningly at the smith, she got a shrug in reply. “‘Friend’ works for now,” said Bismuth.

In the meantime, Peridot had gotten her campers to relax their phalanx. Pumpkin was still creating a riot, but knew better than to charge out into the minefield. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Peridot complained as she circled out from behind the trash cans.

“I tried!” Connie snapped.

“I meant before that,” Peridot chided her. “I have dozens of cellular communicators, and Lapis still maintains her electronic mailbox. You might have warned us.”

For once, Connie didn’t have a comeback. The reminder of Lapis’s email made her remember why, and for whom, Lapis had learned how to email in the first place, and a fresh wave of guilt flooded into her half-hollow.

“Sorry to drop by unannounced,” Bismuth called. “Connie didn’t really tell me anything about you two.”

“Likewise,” called Peridot. “And you can disembark the pad now. I’ve put the mines back into standby mode.”

“A minefield with an off switch?” Bismuth laughed, and then remarked to Connie, “Oh, I really like her! She’s wily!”

A shadow of pale blue emerged from inside the barn. Rubbing sleep from her eyes, Lapis mumbled, “Peridot? What’s all the noise? I thought I heard a gloop—”

When she saw the large new Gem stepping down from the warp pad, Lapis froze, then shrank back behind one of the barn’s alloyed doors. Peering with one eye from behind cover, she gripped the door’s edge, her blue knuckles trembling.

“Connie?” Lapis called warily, never taking her eye off Bismuth.

Connie swallowed another helping of guilt into her half-hollow. Her flair for the dramatic was causing extra problems, it seemed. “Hi, Lapis! It’s okay. She’s with me,” Connie assured the skittish Gem.

Lapis did not seem convinced. “And who is she?” she asked, still watching Bismuth’s every move.

Before Connie could answer, Bismuth stepped forward, her thumbs hooked in the straps of her apron, and announced, “I’m Bismuth. I was a Crystal Gem. I fought to kick Homeworld’s facets off this planet. I planned to shatter every one of ‘em. When Rose Quartz found out about my plan, she poofed me and hid me away. Then, when Steven found me and let me out, I tried to shatter him too. So the Crystal Gems poofed me and hid me again, until Gusty here popped my bubble on accident.”

Like Lapis, Connie could only stand in silent horror as Bismuth puffed out her chest with pride.

“Well,” said Peridot, “welcome to the farm! I’m Peridot, co-commander of this facility. That’s my counterpart, Lapis, over there. These are some war machines I made from human garbage. And that’s the gourd that Steven awakened for us. Would you like a tour?”

Bismuth wrapped her hands around her midsection, laughing so hard that she could hardly nod in reply.

“We’re going baked potato?” Bismuth repeated the words as though trying to assemble them like a jigsaw puzzle.

Peridot nodded emphatically, beaming with pride. “Then I jammed the dissipator into her face, and poof! No more Milky Quartz. Her Flint partner was so frightened that she collected the other Quartz’s gemstone and retreated immediately!”

“Okay,” drawled Bismuth, “but what’s a potato?”

“A small, tuberous plant that humans cultivate for its nutrients,” Peridot answered matter-of-factly. When she glanced back to see the larger Gem even more confused, she shrugged and said, “It’s a farm thing.”

Connie followed the pair through the barn doors and into the chaos of Peridot’s workshop. All throughout the tour, Connie had remained silent, letting Peridot do the talking. The littler Gem had a surprising flair for the dramatic, especially when it came to showing off her own accomplishments. Everything, from the gloop mines and sensors, to the barn’s piecemeal armor plating, the crops, and the captured Roaming Eye, received the praise of a ridiculously proud and overbearing parent. It was a kind of praise Connie knew all too well from the occasions when her own parents would effusively brag about all of the extracurriculars they had assigned to her.

But something unexpected concerned her, and it followed them like a blue ghost. Silently, sullenly, Lapis drifted behind the tour. Her gaze remained fixed on the back of Bismuth’s head, her eyes rocking gently with the sway of those rainbow dreadlocks. Every time Bismuth glanced back, Lapis would freeze, flinching, as though she might sprout wings and bolt into the sky.

She knew Lapis didn’t take well to strangers, but Connie hadn’t been expecting a reaction of outright fear from her friend. Not knowing what else to do, Connie tried to keep herself between Lapis and Bismuth, hoping it might make Lapis feel better. It didn’t seem to help.

The interior of the barn was a funhouse mirror of Bismuth’s forge. The sweltering volcanic lair had been cluttered, but in an orderly fashion, with weapons and items grouped in some semblance of logic. Peridot’s workshop was more akin to an open, chaotic brain, with half-finished projects littering the floors and tables and even the walls. Splayed wiring and disconnected components spilled from one project to the next, and nothing seemed finished, with tools abandoned between projects as though forgotten on their way from one job to the next.

“Yeesh. And I thought Amethyst’s place was a lot…” cringed Bismuth.

“Thank you,” Peridot replied graciously. “These are just a few things I’ve been working on. Mostly sensor packages to establish an electronic frontier around the premises.”

“Peridot’s been essential to our team since she got here,” Connie added. “Even before we found out about Shard’s invasion, Peridot was helping me and Jade with our, um, connection. And before that, she helped stop the Cluster from blowing up the Earth!”

When Bismuth looked confused at the mention of it, Peridot explained, “It was just your basic super-weapon amalgamated from fragmented Gem components. I prevented it from bursting through the Earth’s mantle and causing total global collapse. With some assistance from Steven, of course.”

“Super-weapon, huh? Not hard to guess who put it there.” Bismuth’s confusion cooled into a sour expression.

Still puffed with pride, Peridot said, “I’m flattered, but no. That happened before I was made. I was just sent here to facilitate its emergence.”

Bismuth went perfectly still in a way that reminded Connie of nature documentaries where jungle predators paused an instant before pouncing. “What did you say?” the smith asked flatly.

As Connie winced and braced herself, Peridot answered cheerfully, “Yellow Diamond ordered me and her top soldier to visit Earth and survey the Cluster’s progress. It’s how Lapis and I got here. It’s a funny story, actually!”

“It’s not,” whispered Lapis.

“But then Peridot figured out how great Earth is!” Connie hastened to add. She stepped between the two with her arms spread wide and her smile spread wider, silently hoping she wouldn’t be trampled by the hulking smith on her way to crushing Peridot. “And now she’s a Crystal Gem!”

“I even called Yellow Diamond a clod! That probably makes me Homeworld’s number one enemy!” Peridot laughed.

Gradually, Bismuth’s hands unclenched. A soft chuckle shook her massive shoulders, and she said, “I guess that is a funny story.”

Connie let her arms drop and released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. 

Something else caught Bismuth’s attention, and she bent to pull something from one of the project piles. “Hey, what’s this?” she asked.

“No, don’t—!” Peridot tried to protest too late as Bismuth drew a long, jointed metal component out from the bottom of the pile. The remaining pile collapsed in on itself, scattering pieces across the floor as Bismuth lifted the curio for closer examination.

Connie craned her neck to see around the smith’s elbow. The object in question was thick metal tubing, segmented in the middle, with what looked like an old steel-toed boot affixed to one end. But as Connie looked closer, she realized that the metal wasn’t a tube, but instead a leg. A hinged joint in the middle served as a knee, protected with what looked to be an old recycled dinner plate for a guard.

Shockingly, Peridot flushed with embarrassment, something Connie couldn’t ever recall seeing the little engineer doing. “They’re…limb enhancers.”

Bismuth’s curious frown deepened with confusion. “What’s a limb enhancer?”

“It’s an enhancement. For limbs,” Peridot explained lamely. At Bismuth’s persistent confusion, she sighed and added, “For…less capable Gems.”

Her confusion dropped into a heavy scowl as Bismuth snapped, “What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Less capable?’”

Peridot shifted uncomfortably, and her eyes darted about the workshop, unable to meet Bismuth’s dark gaze. “If you really have been incapacitated since the war, then you wouldn’t have known,” she explained. “Modern Gems lack the robust availability of resources that your Era experienced. So we supplement our deficiencies with technology.”

Connie chewed on her lip, thinking back. Steven had never told her about any of the differences between older and newer Gems. He’d mentioned once or twice that Peridot had possessed some kind of artificial limb extensions when she’d been their enemy, but the context of what that might mean was totally new to Connie. Rubies and Sapphires were smaller, so Connie had just assumed that Peridot was of an average size for her type. 

Dimly, she thought she could remember Jade remarking on Peridot’s size. But back then, Connie had been more concerned with getting the Homeworld Gem out of her. That was all long before—

She tamped down on that thought, and stuffed it into her half-hollow.

“Peridot,” said Connie, eager for an escape from her own head, “why have you never mentioned this before. I’ve never seen you working on these.”

“I don’t like to work on them when anyone else is around,” Peridot admitted. Her eyes flitted to Lapis, who stood silently in the corner, and the little engineer corrected herself. “Almost anyone. It’s not easy talking about it with Era One Gems. I’ve tried explaining it to Steven and Amethyst, and they helped me feel better about it…”

Apropos of nothing, Connie could hear Steven telling her, I get it, for the millionth time after Jade’s gemstone and powers refused to work for her for the millionth time. More fuel for her half-hollow.

“...but there’s no arguing that certain aspects of my functionality are still lacking. Particularly my tactical capabilities,” Peridot continued. “When I arrived, I was more than a match for the collective might of the Crystal Gems. Now I need to build a whole exo-suit just to beat up Pearl.”

Bismuth said nothing while her fingers probed the casing of the limb enhancer. Her hands dwarfed the artificial limb, easily wrapping around its girth with a full knuckle’s length to spare. Carefully, she ran her thumb over the entire length of the enhancer, tapping at its knee guard and tugging on the steel-toed end.

Then, with one sharp motion, Bismuth broke the shin of the enhancer in half, creating a metallic thunderclap that made Connie slap her hands over her ears in pain.

Peridot grabbed fistfuls of her wiry yellow hair and screamed, “What are you doing?”

Bismuth tapped the jagged edge of the broken shin. “This is die-cast, right? Total garbage. One Quartz gets a lucky shot in, and you’re a cloud.”

“But… But…” Peridot stammered. Tears rimmed her visored eyes.

“Garbage,” Bismuth reiterated, lifting her voice. “In fact, I think this whole idea of ‘limb enhancers’ is garbage. What high-collared upper crust piece of schist told you that you needed ‘enhancing?’ That you needed to be fixed?”

“Um…Yellow Diamond?” squeaked Peridot.

“You aren’t deficient,” Bismuth told her. “None of us are, not one single Gem. And if we’d done what we should have back in my day, the whole universe would know it!”

For one brief moment, Connie thought she was seeing the Bismuth that the others had known, the Bismuth that had tried to shatter Steven on her way to turning the entire Diamond Authority into so much gravel. The words made Connie feel powerful, but the rage in Bismuth’s voice made her instinctively reach for a sword at her back that wasn’t there.

Quickly, though, Bismuth deflated. The anger in her face gave way to a kind of deep exhaustion, and she said in a softer voice, “But it didn’t work out that way. So now only Earth knows it. That doesn’t make it any less true.”

“Wow,” Peridot whispered with stars in her eyes. “Your statement is empirically false, but highly inspiring! Still, it doesn’t change my relative inability to more directly contribute to tactical operations.”

A silvery thread of surprise wound through Connie’s stomach as she considered the diminutive Gem. This was the first she had ever heard of Peridot wishing she could join in the fight more directly. “Peridot, do you really want to fight?” Connie asked.

“Well..no,” Peridot said. “I’m not built for fighting. But the Earth is my home too. Can’t I help protect it?”

Something inside Connie shifted, and she felt her breath catch. For perhaps the first time, she was able to see Peridot as something more than a mad genius who strapped her to various inventions. All of the other Crystal Gems, Steven included, seemed so much more capable and powerful than Connie, that she thought she would always be the de facto bottom of their battle roster. She’d never dreamed that Peridot might feel the same way.

Bismuth nodded, and said, “You can. You just need the right tools for the job.” Then she tossed aside the halves of the broken enhancer, and continued, “And the first thing we’re gonna make for you is a proper set of armor.”

“Armor? Wait, ‘we?’” Peridot echoed, confused.

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Bismuth said, and winked. Then realization struck her, and she said, “Oh, right. You literally don’t know. Well, every material weapon or shield that ended up in a Crystal Gem’s hands back during the war came from ‘these’ hands,” she said, and held up her fists.

“Oh. Oh!” Peridot brightened. “I’ve seen a number of those artifacts here on Earth! They’re quite impressive in their own archaic way.”

“I’m gonna let that little comment slide since, from my perspective, you’re basically from the future,” Bismuth laughed. “But yeah, if you want something that can take a little punishment, you’re gonna want it forged. And I find myself with an abundance of time at the moment, so you’re in luck.”

Peridot’s excitement cooled, and her brows dipped behind her visor in a frown. “But how is a set of armor any different than limb enhancement? Both prostheses augment my physical attributes.”

Rubbing the back of her neck, Bismuth admitted, “Maybe they’re not so different. But words matter. And part of breaking out of the upper crust’s mold is about breaking out of their thinking. ‘Limb enhancers’ are a fix for defective Gems, but ‘armor’ is protection for a warrior. ‘Rebels’ are just disobedient servants, but ‘Crystal Gems’ are freedom fighters. It’s all about translating their words into something that fits us all better.”

“I see,” Peridot said, nodding. Then her eyes bulged, and she drew in a long, dramatic gasp. “Oh, my stars! Translation!” she cried. 

She fled from the barn without another word, making a beeline for her cobbled satellite dish command center across the yard.

Bismuth kicked the limb enhancer halves under the worktable and watched Peridot lose herself in a keyboard and screen. “They poured a whole lotta Gem into her mold when they made her,” she remarked to Connie.

“Peridot is definitely a lot,” Connie said with a carefully neutral face. But even she was forced to be impressed by Peridot’s commitment to expanding past her limits. 

Laughing, Bismuth nodded in understanding. As her laughter quelled, however, her eye drifted back toward the corner. “What’s the matter, Blue? Do I have soot on my face or something?” she asked, and rubbed her cheeks.

Connie followed Bismuth’s gaze and was surprised to see Lapis shrinking back from where the slender blue Gem peered at them from behind the door frame. Caught in her espionage, Lapis blushed, and scrunched as if trying to make herself too small to see.

“Sorry. It’s nothing,” Lapis mumbled. Her wings emerged, and she started turning to leave.

“Hey, come on, now,” Bismuth said. Her tone was direct, but somehow gentle in a way that made Connie wonder if the smith had entreated new Crystal Gem warriors too nervous to speak up after a lifetime of rules against such things. “I didn’t come here to chase you out of your own place. What’s up? Were you looking for some armor too? Maybe a war ribbon? You’ve got the right build for one.”

Connie desperately wanted to know more about war ribbons. But her thoughts of asking crumbled when Lapis said, “I think you poofed me.”

“Really?” Bismuth said, confused. “When?”

Her eyes grew reflective as Lapis said, “During the war…”

The blood drained from Connie’s face. Of all the possible outcomes she had imagined for introducing Bismuth to the farm Gems, this coincidence had never even crossed her mind. Cautiously, she began to inch herself toward the space between Lapis and Bismuth, not entirely certain of what she would do, or could do, if words escalated to blows.

Humming thoughtfully, Bismuth rubbed her chin and scrutinized Lapis. After a moment, she merely shrugged and said, “I might have, if you were on Earth back then. Hey, no hard feelings, alright?”

Lapis’s eyes flashed. “No hard feelings?” she echoed. Her wings snapped straight out to their full span. Behind her, the surface of the pond in the barnyard rippled as if a tremendous creature were about to surface from the depths.

To her credit, Bismuth did not raise her voice to match Lapis’s, and the bigger Gem kept her movements small and slow, as though Lapis were a spooked animal. “I won’t apologize for what I did back then. It was war,” she said in that firm, gentle tone again.

“The Crystal Gems started the war!” snapped Lapis.

Connie could feel the air around the blue Gem begin to whorl as the ambient humidity was drawn into her anger.

Ever calm, Bismuth said, “We did. We wanted to be free. Free to live how we wanted to live, and free to live here on Earth. Like you and Peridot are right now,” she said.

Slowly, gradually, the air around Lapis settled. Her wings drooped, then retracted, and she seemed to deflate. “Yeah,” she murmured, casting her eyes to the ground. “Whatever.”

Bismuth spread her palms. “If you wanna scrap about it, I don’t mind. We could go a few rounds, pound our mettle against each other until you feel better.”

“What? No!” Lapis recoiled, and Connie wondered if her friend was even aware of how close she had come to throwing a tsunami at them. “I don’t want to fight. I don’t like to fight!”

“That’s okay,” said Bismuth.

“Yeah, Lapis,” Connie insisted gently, not daring to take a step forward lest she spook Lapis all over again. “Nobody has to fight right now.”

“But it always comes to that, doesn’t it?” Lapis said bitterly. “Homeworld, the Crystal Gems, those Shard Gems… Why can’t we just be left alone? Why does everyone want to fight?”

Connie was at a loss for words as Lapis folded her arms and shrank into herself. The last time a battle had shown up to the farm, Lapis had nearly been baked and shattered by Flint. Only Jade’s winds had saved her, and Connie, from the flames. 

The memory of that prickling heat still raised goosebumps in Connie’s skin. What had it done to Lapis, who had worked so hard to find some modicum of peace after being forced back to Earth as Homeworld’s pawn again?

“Because we have to,” Bismuth said. “I don’t know what these new troublemakers are after, but I’d bet they want what Homeworld wants: everything their way, with everybody doing what they say. That’s why the Crystal Gems fight. So they don’t get to be in charge anymore. Not here.”

Unable to lift her gaze, Lapis muttered, “I’m not even a Crystal Gem.”

With a start, Bismuth touched the empty space on her arm where her star had once been. “Me either, I guess,” admitted Bismuth. “But I’ll fight anybody who tries to tell me how I gotta live. I hope you do too.”

It was the exact wrong thing to say to Lapis, who staggered backwards from the door. Her mirrored irises flickered to and fro as if in search of a danger she could sense but not see. “I… I’m sorry, I’m just… I have to go.”

“Lapis!” Connie called too late. The water Gem spread her wings and darted into the sky, vanishing against the blue too quickly for the eye to follow.

Bismuth sighed and massaged her brow. “Still got the charm,” she said, laughing hollowly to herself. “I’m guessing that’s not how you wanted this to go. Huh, Gusty?”

“I’m sorry,” Connie said. “Lapis is sensitive about that kind of talk. I should have warned you. That’s my fault.”

“Don’t need to apologize. We’re supposed to disagree with each other on Earth. It’s the only planet where we can,” said Bismuth. “I’m guessing she hasn’t had it easy since I popped her back then.”

Connie shook her head. “Homeworld found her and trapped her in a mirror. And then she—”

Her voice faltered under Bismuth’s curious stare. When she didn’t continue, Bismuth raised an eyebrow. “If she’s still on Earth, that must mean that our side found her. And all of that hurt she’s carrying seems pretty fresh. When did the others let her out?”

Connie wilted. “Last year,” she admitted.

Disgust twisted in Bismuth’s face. “Guess we have more in common than I thought,” she growled.

“B-But Steven found her! And found this place for her to live!” Connie added hurriedly. 

The words only hardened Bismuth’s expression. “He found me too. Look how that turned out.”

She could feel the situation slipping from her control, and Connie fought back a wave of panic. “I’m sorry, Bismuth,” she said. “I just… I wanted you to get a chance to spend time with some other Gems. See that there were other Gems on Earth besides Steven and his family. Gems who used to work for Homeworld, but are good now! So maybe you wouldn’t…”

As Connie trailed off, Bismuth’s eyebrows climbed into her dreadlocks. “Wouldn’t what? Shatter them? Is that what you’re worried I’ll do?”

“...isn’t it?” Connie asked, shrinking.

Bismuth’s eyebrows dropped into a deep scowl, one that frightened Connie back a step. “You already told me what happened when Rose shattered Pink Diamond. Homeworld poisoned this whole planet rather than let us win. I know that shattering ‘em isn’t how we’re going to win the next fight, Connie. Besides, every friend I made in the Crystal Gems started out working for Homeworld. I did. Even Rose did. I don’t want to shatter anybody just because of who they used to be.”

“Oh.” Connie sighed, relieved. “That’s—”

“What I’m mad about,” Bismuth continued, her voice climbing, her shoulders rising, “is how Rose bubbled me away, and then did what I said to do anyway. And when I got upset about that, I got bubbled again. By Steven. Who might actually just be Rose, for all we know.”

“He’s not!” insisted Connie.

But Bismuth’s voice kept climbing. “And then my friends locked me away, just like Rose did. And apparently, they’ve been doing it to other Gems too! What do you think, Connie? Is that worth getting mad about?”

Bismuth loomed over Connie. The smith’s hands had shaped themselves into blades on reflex. Her eyes were wild and dark, and they blazed like coals. It took every ounce of courage Connie had not to backpedal and pull a sword under Bismuth’s furious gaze.

Trembling and small, Connie said, “Yes.”

As if realizing her posture, Bismuth slunk back a step. Her shoulders slumped, and her blades became fists again, which she rubbed tiredly into her eyes.

“Look,” said Bismuth, “I’m gonna grab some measurements from Peridot, and then I’m gonna go back to the forge. Thanks for the break, Connie.”

And she lumbered around Connie, heading out the door. “Bismuth, wait!” Connie pleaded.

“Wait a while before you come around again,” Bismuth tossed over her shoulder as she left.

Connie watched the Gem walk away, and felt her heart sinking. She had so badly wanted that afternoon to be a break from conflict, a way to make things better instead of worse. A little peace for both of them between life-threatening dangers and betrayal. In the end, though, Lapis had been right.

Somehow, it always came back to fighting.

Chapter Text

Connie groaned and lowered the tablet as she sagged deeper into the couch cushions.

Seated at the island counter in the beach house’s kitchen, Steven looked up from his morning bowl of Pumpkin Pete’s Marshmallow Flakes at her audible distress. Sympathy creased his forehead as he said, “Season Five?”

She nodded as she rubbed her eyes. Her daily training to control her booking power had continued apace with no real progress. The modified video app containing bootlegged copies of Camp Pining Hearts —complete with burned-in subtitles in three different languages—had all been indelibly burned into her memory despite being played twenty times faster than normal. Thanks to the accelerated playback, she had consumed the first four seasons of the show in a matter of weeks despite only spending an hour each morning on the watch.

He winced in sympathy. “There are a few good episodes in there,” he said with tentative optimism. “Paulette has a storyline about finding a mythical Tim Hortons in the woods—”

Just hearing Paulette’s name triggered Connie’s booking power, forcing her to relive every moment of her journey in the blink of an eye. Pressing at her temples as if to push back against the involuntary remembering, Connie snapped, “The storylines aren’t the problem!” Then she caught her harsh tone, and the glimpse of hurt that Steven tried to bury in his expression, and she felt even worse. “Sorry,” she said more softly.

He slid from his stool. “It’s okay. I get it,” he assured her.

Connie gritted her teeth and shoved yet another I get it into her half-hollow.

“Uncontrollable powers are the pits,” he continued, unaware. Then he brightened with a thought, and padded over to the couch, settling into the far side of it from her. 

Reaching back behind his seat, he pulled a large, square shape wrapped in an old paper shopping bag. Careful to shield its contents from her, he drew out her copy of The Unfamiliar Familiar from the bag. Her headache lifted almost immediately, and she lifted her eyes to the ceiling to keep from booking the cover he so carefully blocked from her sight. 

“Maybe we can fight bad stories with a good story?” he suggested.

He propped the book on the couch’s armrest, pointedly keeping his legs cleared. Though he didn’t say it, the pink color of his cheeks confirmed it as a silent invitation. Since that first time on the porch, Steven had read to her two more times, and both times she’d ended up pillowing her head on his lap again.

Connie gulped. She could think of a dozen other, more responsible things to be doing. Her wind powers still needed honing. The sword always demanded more practice. Nevertheless, she felt herself sliding across the couch, rotating to lay down across the cushions. Her own cheeks flooded to match his, and her heart flipped in her chest.

The warp pad chimed, shining with a new arrival. When the light faded, Peridot charged into the beach house, screaming at the top of her lungs. “CONNIE JADE!”

Connie yelped and tumbled off the couch while Steven shot straight into the air, floating above the cushions as he rotated slowly with the book clutched to his chest.

Heedless of their disarray, Peridot zeroed in on Connie, grabbing her by the arm and straining to drag her toward the warp pad. “Hurry! There’s no time to waste!” the little Gem grunted.

With a twist, a tuck, and a roll, Connie flipped onto her feet with Peridot’s arm locked firmly behind the Gem’s back, and Peridot slammed face-down onto the floor in Connie’s place. Though the counter-grapple came to Connie on instinct, she caught herself before twisting the arm any more than necessary. She did not, however, release Peridot from the joint lock.

“What are you talking about?” demanded Connie.

“I already told you!” Peridot howled, squirming underneath her captor. Then she went limp and said, “Wait. No, I forgot that part. Sorry.”

Semi-relucantly, Connie released Peridot and helped the Gem to her feet. Steven had by this point gained control of his altitude and was settling back to the floor next to them. “What is it, Peridot?” he asked.

Puffing with excitement, Peridot said, “I’ve devised a means of accessing Pink Diamond’s database inside Connie Jade!”

At the mention of it, Connie’s mind filled with a rush of Gem glyphs that slammed between her ears with the ringing noise of hammer and steel. She crushed her eyes shut and fought against the noise. “How? I’m practicing every day, but I’m not getting any better,” Connie said, and pointed to the discarded tablet.

Peridot’s eyes gleamed behind her visor. “Oh! What season are you up to? Did you get to the part where the camp werewolf—? No. No, there’s no time. But we will talk about it later. I need to make sure your favorite camp couple is— No! It’s so important, but it has to wait!” Peridot wailed, her impulses at open war within her.

“Why do we need to hurry, Peridot? Connie’s had that stuff in her head almost a week now,” said Steven. His fingers worried at the cover of the book still clutched cover-side-in at his chest.

Connie answered before Peridot could. “Because we need answers to what Shard’s up to on Earth, Steven!”

The renegade Gems hadn’t been spotted since their brawl with Connie and Garnet in the strawberry battlefields. With so much time uninterrupted, they could have already completed their nefarious works, whatever they might be. If they could learn some clue as to what those nefarious plans were, the Crystal Gems might finally get the chance to go on the offensive.

Connie was tired of chasing and patrolling. When she glanced at the book again, she felt ashamed and disgusted for almost wasting her morning with something so frivolous. More fuel for her half-hollow.

Steven caught sight of her expression, and his argument wilted. He quickly bagged the book again and said, “Right. Let’s go get the other guys.”

“Yes! I’ll collect them while you two complete any disgusting bathroom business you might have. If you do it at the same time, we’ll be ready even faster!” Peridot declared. Then the little Gem barrelled across the kitchen to the temple door, which failed to budge when she ran face-first into the teal stone. She bounced back to her feet and began pounding on the door with her fists, yelling at the top of her voice, “Hey! HEY! You forgot to give me access!”

The teens watched her pound fruitlessly on the door for a moment. Steven, cheeks even pinker than they had been before, told Connie, “You can go first in the bathroom. I’ll help Peridot with the door.”

As Steven left to wrangle Peridot, Connie’s thoughts lingered around the database. She circled the shape of it in her mind warily, fearful of experiencing that hammer-blow again. If the database held the key to finding Pyrite, she would endure any number of Peridot’s mad experiments for the chance. 

Shard’s thug still owed her the sword of Rose Quartz. And now that Connie had her own sword, and Jade’s winds to back it up, she owed Pyrite a rematch.

A beautiful summer sun shone over the barnyard. Huge cotton ball clouds drifted lazily across the blue sky, pushed by a gentle breeze that murmured through the cornfield. It was as perfect a day for lazing about as had ever existed while the Crystal Gems held a war council around Peridot’s command center.

The mood of their gathering beneath the cobbled scrap metal satellite dish ached with tension. Connie stood beside Steven, with Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl looming behind them as they all watched Peridot type on one of the secondhand keyboards hodgepodged into the collection of devices. Even Lapis had swallowed her loud disinterest in Crystal Gem affairs to watch the proceedings. 

“A recent moment of inspiration made me realize the solution to Connie Jade’s inability to read the information she acquired on the Moon,” Peridot explained while her fingers clacked at a break-knuckle pace. “The problem is one of translation: her human component can’t understand a language that is an innate part of any other Gem’s creation. Excepting Steven, of course.”

“He is exceptional,” Pearl boasted, and ruffled Steven’s hair affectionately.

“And so we need to do something antithetical to Gemkind, yet so intrinsic to Earth life, that I’m almost embarrassed to have not thought of it beforehand,” Peridot said. “We have to teach her. In order to understand the database, Connie Jade will learn how to read its original language.”

“Really? I thought humans just kind of got languages on their own. Isn’t that how you learned to talk, Steven?” said Amethyst.

“I don’t really remember,” Steven admitted.

“Psh. You already forgot? It’s barely been a decade,” Amethyst scoffed.

Connie stepped forward, bracing herself with a deep breath. She knew Peridot would not have demanded their trip to the farm just for an announcement. Nor would the engineer have the patience to tutor Connie the way Pearl had.

Her imagination broke its leash, running wild into a thicket of nightmarish images: Peridot, sawing off the top of her head to pour liquified knowledge directly into her brain; sinking a long sharp probe up her nose to etch a language directly into the speech center of her brain; connecting jumper cables to her ears and passing one-point-twenty-one gigawatts of information between the leads; scooping out her eyes like melon balls and tricking Jade’s gemstone into growing her new ones.

Clenching her fists to keep them from shaking, Connie set her jaw and said, “Do whatever you have to do.”

Peridot finished her work, and then guided Connie forward to stand at the main monitor of the command center. Placing Connie’s hand on the keyboard, Peridot instructed, “Press the spacebar to start, and keep your focus on the screen. When you need to blink, just hold down the spacebar until your eyes are re-moistened, then release it to continue.”

Connie waited for the rest of the horrible procedure to be described. Then the computer will suck out your brain and replace it with an Atari, or something equally on-brand. But the little engineer merely stepped back with the other Gems and waited with uncharacteristic patience. So, ready for the worst, Connie did as Peridot said, and pressed the spacebar key. 

The screen began to flicker at an unreadable pace. Keeping her eyes wide and trained in the center of the monitor, Connie stared. And stared. And stared. And stared. Occasionally, her brain would recognize the sight of English lettering, but never enough to identify anything familiar.

The process took nearly ten full minutes. Connie made an effort to blink as little as possible, but Peridot didn’t seem concerned whenever Connie paused the process using the spacebar. Pearl and Garnet stood with unwavering patience. Less than a minute into the process, Amethyst abandoned them, found a piece of string, and joined Steven in teaching Lapis how to play Cat’s Cradle.

At last, the screen went black, and Peridot cried, “Done!” She flipped a switch on the console to deactivate the rig.

Connie, with no invasive probes anywhere whatsoever, looked to Peridot with confusion. “What exactly is done?” she asked nervously.

Peridot answered with a question of her own. “Connie Jade, on what stardate was the Diamond Database last updated?”

“Oh-One-Oh-Eight-Three-Point-Zero,” Connie answered immediately. “But what does that have to do with…”

She trailed off, realizing what she had just said. Without any effort, she had booked a piece of the database. The other Gems stared at her with a mix of surprise and confusion. Pearl especially seemed shaken at hearing the answer.

“Ha ha! I’m amazing!” Peridot crowed and jumped with glee. “Please don’t hold your applause!”

“What did you do to me?” Connie insisted, torn between being impressed and horrified.

“I wrote a complex series of algorithms for translating the Gem language into Human English, then transposed the algorithms into a visually digestible medium,” Peridot explained.

Connie settled on being horrified. “You PROGRAMMED me?” she cried, clutching at her head.

“Exactly,” agreed Peridot. “Theoretically, I could program any number of behaviors or information into you using the same method. Just ask, and I’ll code it for you.”

“Whoa,” Amethyst said, letting the string cradle in her fingers slacken. “Would that work on me? Could you teach me to whistle?”

“It only works on Gems with informational retention and recall abilities, like Jades or Ambers,” Peridot explained.

“And you already know how to whistle,” Garnet added.

“Only with my mouth!” insisted Amethyst.

Connie listened to the exchange from a great mental distance. Her mind whirled at the notion that she could be programmed to learn new languages, and possibly new behaviors. On the one hand, it made the language credit requirements looming ahead in high school seem like a paltry concern. Ten minutes with Peridot, and she could pass any language class on the first day. 

On the other hand, she imagined what someone less quote-unquote scrupulous than Peridot might do to her with power. Just one year ago, her parents would have paid a fortune for the power to program her into the perfect daughter. The thought of it froze her blood cold.

Steven rested a warm hand on her shoulder, pulling her from the spiraling thought. “Peridot, from now on, you have to promise to only put things into Connie’s brain when she asks for it,” he told the engineer sternly.

Peridot looked wounded by the words. “Of course! I told you all, this was about accessing the database. I would never overwrite a friend’s free will without her explicit permission!”

All eyes fell to Connie, who nodded. She at least trusted that Peridot wouldn’t be outright malicious with this new ability. And Connie could always close her eyes and plug her ears if she thought she was being manipulated.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see what’s in this thing.”

And she booked the Diamond Database.

With tremendous effort, Connie cracked one eye open and saw a ring of figures hovering above her against the canvas of the blue sky. She blinked away a wash of tears until all of the Crystal Gems came into focus. They stared down at her with expressions of concern, and it was then that Connie realized she was lying on the ground.

“Wha’ happen’d?” she groaned, raising her voice to hear herself above the ringing in her ears. Her mouth felt cottony and tasted like pennies. Something wet tickled her upper lip.

Steven pressed a hand to her shoulder to keep her from rising. “You fainted,” he said, his tone and eyes wobbling as he pressed a tissue into her hand.

Reflexively, Connie lifted the tissue to her tickled lip, and saw it come away red. She wiped more aggressively until the nosebleed was clean. Then, with Steven’s help, she climbed back to her feet. The other Gems backed away to give them space, but Steven lingered, keeping a hand at her side. Connie thought his worry wasn’t needed, but she leaned into his touch without saying so.

As the ringing in her ears faded, Connie rubbed at her forehead and muttered, “That was not what I was hoping for.”

Peridot rubbed her chin. “Your human component is the limiting factor. Perhaps I can construct some kind of external supplemental brain that can handle the processing load. We’d just need to install an interface. I think I still have a few spare HDMI cables in the barn…”

Lapis crossed her arms. “Peridot, you just promised you wouldn’t put things in Connie’s head without her permission,” she chided.

“That promise was about software! This is hardware! It’s different!” Peridot cried.

Garnet loomed above the little engineer and suggestd, “Let’s start small instead. Connie, when you feel ready, think about something more specific that might be in the database.”

Of course. If the entire database was too much for Connie to swallow at once, she could try smaller bites. Or bytes? 

She nodded, and readied herself with another deep breath. When Steven’s hand threaded into hers, she held on tight. “Shard,” she said aloud, and plunged the word into her mind.

Nothing in her mind answered.

“Shard’s plan?” she tried again.

Nothing. She shrugged apologetically to her audience of anxious Gems.

“That makes sense,” Pearl said in a comforting tone. “Whoever or whatever Shard is, she isn’t acting on any Diamond’s authority. She probably came along well after that database was created.”

“Let’s try something else,” Peridot suggested. “What about: the Celerity Forge.”

Knowledge belted Connie in the head, staggering her. She booked names, schematics, reports, goals, commands, schedules, orders, and a thousand other facts that overwhelmed her. Steven’s ready hands kept her on her feet, and her own mental bracing kept her from fainting again.

“It’s a laboratory,” Connie grunted. Her mind’s eye skittered across too many thoughts at once, trying to isolate one long enough to understand it. “A propulsion lab. When the rebellion took control of the Galaxy Warp, the Diamonds wanted other ways of reinforcing Earth quickly.”

Pearl frowned. “I never heard about such a place. The Diamonds must have started construction after…the last time Rose and I were able to access their information directly,” she mused aloud, stumbling over the thought. Remembering those times took a toll upon her mentor, Connie knew.

“So Pyrite and those jerks are looking for engines?” Amethyst said. “Like, maybe they’re trying to build a rocket to blow something up?”

As the bites became smaller, the vertigo lessened. “No,” Connie said, “the lab researched faster-than-light options. Things like wormhole generators—”

“Pfft. More like a hole to nowhere,” Peridot scoffed imperiously.

“—warp drives—”

“Wasted effort!” guffawed Peridot.

“—and gravity engines,” Connie finished.

“That’s…!” Peridot paused and frowned. “Oh. That one actually worked. Our Roaming Eye uses vectored artificial gravity to accelerate itself into FTL velocities. Presumably, the cargo ship you and Garnet described uses the same means of propulsion.”

“So why would they need something they already had?” Lapis asked. When all eyes turned to her question, she blushed and retreated a step. “I mean, not that I’m involved. But everything on Earth is already older than that saucer those Quartzes landed in at the farm. Why would they need anything from an old lab?”

“They wouldn’t,” Peridot agreed. “Then why…oh!” Peridot’s eyes widened behind her visor. Without another word, she dashed into the barn and began rooting through one of her many piles of junk.

Pearl wrinkled her nose at the loose flotsam being scattered in Peridot’s wake. “Is she always so needlessly cryptic?” she asked Lapis.

“Part of that is my fault. I got mad at her when she spoiled the ending of Camp Pining Hearts Season Six,” Lapis confessed. “That’s the one where they look under the lake and find—”

“Shhh!” Steven insisted. “Connie hasn’t gotten there yet!”

When Peridot ran back to them, she carried an armload of scorched metallic fragments. The blackened junk looked vaguely familiar to Connie, but she couldn’t place where she’d seen it before.

Breathlessly, Peridot said, “Connie Jade, what energy resources are on-site at the Celerity Forge for testing purposes?”

The answer leapt to Connie’s lips. “Two battleship-grade crystal hearts.”

“Ha!” Peridot cried triumphantly, and threw down her armload of scrap as if to present it to the others.

A wall of uncomprehending stares met her in reply. Amethyst dug an idle finger into her ear and grunted, “We’re gonna need a little more context, P.”

Huffing in exasperation, Peridot gestured to the scraps at her feet and said, “The debris you recovered from the strawberry fields had significant amounts of triweave plastanium polymer.” When she still received no reaction, she sneered, “Like the kind found in reactor shielding? Stars above, do I have to draw you a diagram?”

“I’d like that! I’m a visual learner,” Steven said, and Amethyst nodded in agreement.

But Garnet understood. “You’re saying that Shard wants those crystal hearts.”

“Bingo-bongo!” Peridot cried in triumph. “Any data or equipment in a lab that old would appear antiquated to a modern Gem. The crystal hearts are just as outdated compared to our modern singularity engine cores, but they still put out a tremendous amount of energy. If the Polarite you took this from had this much plastanium, she could only have meant to move those hearts. I’d bet my visor on it,” she declared, and tapped her yellow accoutrement. 

“But what do they need crystal hearts for?” insisted Pearl.

“How should I know?” Peridot retorted. “I’m not a Sapphire. This is all—admittedly brilliant—conjecture based on what we already know.”

Amethyst smacked her fist into her palm. “Okay. So we warp to this Celery Fudge—”

“Celerity Forge,” Peridot corrected her.

“Augh! Whatever! Let’s just go there and push their faces out through their butts already!” growled Amethyst.

“We can’t.” Everyone turned in surprise at Connie’s words. She herself hadn’t expected to say them, but she’d booked the idea without realizing it. “The Celerity Forge is kept off of any warp network. It’s to ensure that the lab isn’t discovered by rebels…I mean, Crystal Gems,” she hurried to correct herself, blushing at the slip.

“So we’re back to having no idea of where they are? This stinks!” Amethyst huffed, folding her arms.

“Do you know where on Earth it is? We could go there without using a warp pad,” Lapis suggested. Then, abashed, she added, “I mean, you could go there without a warp pad.”

Connie booked carefully around the database again, seeking any new piece of information that might lead them to the lab. But Pink Diamond had evidently only been around for the planning stages of the lab, and had never seen it actually built. The outdated information held nothing about the lab’s physical location. 

Frustrated, Connie shook her head at the hopeful, expectant looks around her. A pall of despair settled over their little war council. 

Then Amethyst frowned, struck by a sudden thought. “Hang on. Can they make more of that triweave whatever-it-was stuff you were talking about, Peridot?”

Peridot shook her head. “Extremely unlikely. Humans lack the material science to produce anything close to it. It could take months to synthesize the raw materials here on Earth without a proper manufacturing infrastructure already in place.”

“Maybe they’ll just bring back more from wherever they came from?” Steven suggested.

After a moment’s consideration, Peridot said, “Also unlikely. The material isn’t common anymore, since we long ago abandoned the use of crystal heart power. It’s too resource-intensive and specific to be of much use in other projects, so anything they already brought would have been cannibalized from older technology or specially fabricated. And given the difficulties, if it were me, I know I wouldn’t make more than I needed.”

“But they’ll still need more,” Amethyst insisted. “The last time I licked the crystal heart in the temple, my hair stood up for, like, an hour. It’s not just something you can juggle barehanded.”

“Why would you…” Peridot peered at Amethyst with confusion, but quickly abandoned the thought. “When I was stuck on Earth with no resources at my disposal, I scavenged every piece of tech I could get my hands on. I’d look for any possible Gem wreckage on Earth.”

“What kind of places could we check?” Lapis asked. Her face darkened, and she said, “You. Where can you check? I’m not part of this. As long as they stay away from the farm, I don’t care what happens.”

Oblivious to Lapis’s forced indifference, Peridot said, “Probably another reactor. A big facility that needs a lot of energy at once. Or a shipwreck, I suppose.”

Garnet’s visor glinted in the midday sun as her head tilted toward the sky. “I know where we’ll find them,” she announced.

Pearl gaped in surprise. “You do? But we’ve looked everywhere! And your future vision was never able to find them before!”

“That’s because we never took Peridot with us. This time, we will,” Garnet declared, folding her arms.

“Ha! My effectiveness is so great that it’s now prognosticated!” Peridot jeered at Pearl, who scowled.

“So let’s go get ‘em!” Amethyst cheered.

Connie agreed. She could feel a sailcloth sword aching to be drawn from Jade’s gemstone.

But Garnet shook her head, and said, “We need to stop at the house first.”

“Why?” Steven asked.

“Because,” said Garnet, “we’re going to need CHAAAAPS.”

Chapter Text

Muggy jungle air swallowed Connie as the warp tunnel receded back into the crystal pad beneath her. A thousand different scents and sounds overwhelmed her, mixing together into a heady cocktail of primal sensations. Heat and humidity tugged a sheen of sweat out of her skin, making her instantly, unbearably sticky.

She and the rest of the Crystal Gems stood together on the arrival pad, relaxing apart after having awkwardly crowded each other for the duration of the trip through the tunnel. Around them lay the tall trees and thick underbrush of a rainforest, stretching above them and beyond them in every direction but one. 

Before them loomed the wreckage of a colossal ancient starship. Saucer-shaped, the ship jutted from the broken earth at its base like a tremendous crooked tombstone, rising higher and broader than any building Connie had seen. All around the wreck, a clearing had been carved out of the jungle long ago when it had crashed, and the trees had refused to grow anywhere near its gray hull in the centuries after. It was as though something about the ship had warded it from the relentless undergrowth of the jungle. Somehow the trees knew not to disturb the unearthly relic. 

“What is it?” she asked breathlessly.

Peridot started to answer, seemingly poised to offer details about the ship’s model, and design, and capabilities. But Pearl answered quicker by simply saying, “A colony ship.”

A wave of knowledge booked into Connie’s mind, pulled from Pink Diamond’s archive. She knew how fast the ship had been back when it and thousands of ships like it had served as the bulk of Homeworld’s stellar navy. Nephrite technicians crewed the massive vessels, bringing raw materials and heavy, modular equipment meant to reshape new worlds into Gem colonies. Part cargo ship, part flying factory, each ship held the potential to transform an entire continent into an alien metropolis that sprawled to the horizon.

Connie shivered in the tropical heat, struck numb at the thought of what her planet had almost become millennia before she’d been born. Had the ship completed its mission, she would never have been born at all. 

Each new Gem derelict she came upon held so much beauty. Yet the more she learned about these relics, the more horrifying they seemed.

“I hope Centipeetle is doing alright,” Steven said wistfully. He hefted his cheeseburger backpack higher onto one shoulder. The bulging contents within the pack crinkled and rustled.

“She’s fine,” Amethyst scoffed. She strolled with her hands laced behind her head, unimpressed by the dense jungle surrounding them or the monolithic wreckage before them. “If anything, she’s been extra feisty the last few times we’ve been through here.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Pearl muttered. “She and her crew have been downright hostile the last few times we patrolled this area. They’ve been in such a state, I don’t think even Steven could calm them down anymore!”

“Nah, you just have to speak their language,” Steven insisted assuredly, and patted his crinkling cheeseburger backpack.

Pearl’s expression remained a dubious one as she raised her nose primly and huffed, “Well, whatever the case, they certainly haven’t let those other Gems past them. For all we know, those louts are the ones who riled them up in the first place.”

“We’ll see,” Garnet said, enigmatic as always.

As they reached the base of the wrecked ship, Connie saw a narrow triangular opening cut into the side of the hull, its bottom flush with the jungle floor and the deck plating. A carpet of dirt and vines had crept through the door and spread into the dark interior that waited inside.

Connie fought against her own quickening breath, forcing herself to breathe in long, slow draws. Her heartbeat pounded and her skin prickled. Despite Pearl’s doubt, Garnet seemed confident that Peridot would discover their enemy in the ship. Battle could be only moments away. Connie’s first instinct was to draw her sword. But none of the other Gems were arming themselves as Amethyst led the way through the triangular door. So, swallowing her fear and excitement, Connie filed into the ship with the others.

They walked upon their own long shadows into a cavernous room. With high ceilings and distant walls, the space reminded Connie of her school’s gymnasium. But in lieu of a polished wood floor, a mixture of mud and metal grinded together under her sneakers. Five thousand years of neglect hung on the walls in a mossy web of vines. 

Most disconcerting, however, was the smell. Focused as she was on her own breathing, Connie tasted the difference in the air immediately as they stepped through. Outside, in the sunshine, the air was hot and thick and rich with life. Flowers and trees and thick humidity rolled together into a bouquet that Connie could only describe as jungle. But upon that first step inside, the air became stale. Warm, but distantly so, reheated only by proximity to the actual heat of the climate, and strangely dry. The vines curtaining the walls were desiccated, practically petrified, and the scent of them hung in the air like musty old furniture.

Then an inhuman hiss erupted from the darkness ahead of them. The noise grabbed Connie by her spine, and stopped all of the Crystal Gems in their collective tracks.

As her eyes slowly adjusted, Connie saw it: a long, segmented, insect-like silhouette rising at the far side of the room. A swarm of legs skittered it forward into the shaft of light streaming in behind them, revealing green and black carapace and a flowing mane of snowy white fur. As its jagged maw opened, it revealed a bulbous, greenish gemstone eye as it rattled the room with another long, piercing shriek. Green sludge drizzled from between its teeth, landing in rivulets on the floor that steamed and hissed.

An animal panic coiled around Connie’s stomach at the sight of the inhuman creature, and then squeezed harder when she saw the shadows behind it stirring. Four more black Centipeetles skittered out of the darkness, forming a phalanx behind their green leader, joining in a cacophony of shrieks that filled the cavernous space with noise. It took all of Connie’s courage to not flee from the display. 

“You see?” Pearl shouted, clapping her hands over her ears. “They’ve been like this all week!”

“Sheesh, we get it already!” Amethyst shouted back at the Centipeetle swarm. Her head glowed as she shapeshifted her ears away, leaving the sides of her head bare. 

The Centipeetles shrieked in reply. Their green leader skittered forward, making Connie twitch and reach for the gemstone glowing at her throat. But the leader only jumped a few feet forward, rising up, its bristling mane spread wide as it hissed and swiped at the air with its forelegs. Then it retreated back to the rest of its swarm and continued to shriek.

Steven unplugged his ears to reach for his cheeseburger backpack. Swinging the bag forward, he opened one of the plush beef patties and revealed a bag of CHAAAAPS. The puffed-up bag rustled as he shook it enticingly. “Hey, it’s okay, bud! Look what I brought. And enough to share, even!” Steven called.

In reply, the green Centipeetle jumped forward and rose, its mane bristling as it hissed and swiped at the air with its forelegs. Then it retreated back to the rest of the swarm and continued to shriek.

His smile collapsed into heartbreak as he flinched back a step. “Centi? What’s the matter?” he said, his voice fighting to rise above the noise. “Don’t you recognize CHAAAAPS? Don’t… Don’t you recognize me?”

The green Centipeetle leapt forward in reply, rising up and bristling its mane as it hissed at Steven, swiping at the air with its forelegs. Then it backed away to the other Centipeetles and rejoined their shrieking chorus.

“We should go before they decide to stop warning us and just attack!” Pearl insisted loudly. “If they won’t let us in, they certainly didn’t let anyone else inside!”

“WHAT?” the earless Amethyst shouted.

Fighting her instincts to run from what she now realized was the second titanic insect she’d encountered that week—though the Giga-Wasp still won in terms of size and mass, if not numbers—Connie looked to Garnet for some sign that they should fall back from the ship. 

But Garnet wasn’t looking at the Centipeetles. Instead, she was looking at Peridot. And Peridot, too, ignored the snarling corruptions. The tiny engineer’s visor was turned toward the far corner of the room. There, amidst the desiccated vines and the dirt-smudged deck plating, sat a large gray boulder, and next to it, a gnarled, uprooted sapling. The boulder had a skirt of moss around its base, suggesting that it had been there for a long, long time. The sapling looked likewise old, stripped of its leaves and branches so that it was little more than a long, narrow stick with two gnarled roots twisting out of the bottom of its trunk and a pair of withered branches in the middle.

After a long moment’s examination, Peridot announced loudly, “Well, this place is definitely empty! We should go before those disgusting creatures consume us!”

Steven frowned at her cruel words for the Centipeetles, and started to protest. But he stopped as Peridot turned around and raised a palm, positioning the gesture so that the Centipeetles wouldn’t see it.

“Everybody pretend to leave,” Peridot instructed, her low voice all but lost in the Centipeetles’ shrieking. “Then, Amethyst, get a rock—”

“WHAT?” Amethyst bellowed.

Impatiently, Peridot gestured to the sides of her head, and then waited for Amethyst to shapeshift a pair of ears again. Once she had, Peridot instructed her, “Get a rock and throw it as hard as you can at that boulder or that dead tree in the corner.”

The brief confusion in Amethyst’s face melted into a warm smile. “See, this is why we need you on more missions, P-dot: you understand what I have to contribute.”

“WELL, HERE WE GO! WE’RE LEAVING!” Peridot bellowed at the Centipeetles, and began marching back for the triangular door. In response, their leader jumped forward and rose up, its mane bristling as it hissed at the retreating Gems. 

As she turned to follow Peridot’s theatrical exit, Pearl said, “But why—”

Her protest was cut short when Amethyst threw her arm out the door, turning it into a glowing white tendril that swiped a fist-sized stone out of the mud. “Fastball!” Amethyst cried as she let the rock fly into the corner of the ship’s hold.

The rock struck true near the top of the gnarled tree. Immediately, the tree bent forward, its branches swinging up to cover the spot where the rock had bounced off its bark. “AUGH! Right in my JANKIN’ eye!” the tree howled.

“Ha! I knew that stuff wasn’t there the last time I was here!” Peridot crowed, planting her hands on her hips.

As Connie watched in confusion, the mossy boulder twisted in place as if to face the cursing tree. “Are you okay, Flint?” the boulder asked in a deep voice pitched with concern.

The gnarled sapling flicked a branch back to slap the boulder, with its other branch still cradling its upper trunk. “Why would I be okay, you great, useless slab of marble? That little piece of schist hit me in my EYE!”

“But trees don’t have eyes,” the boulder insisted, sounding confused. “Or, wait. Do they? Are they under the bark? How would they see through the bark?”

Snarling, the sapling burst into flames amidst a string of furious offworld curses, most of which Connie didn’t recognize. The noise set off the Centipeetles again, sending their leader forward to rear back and swipe at the Crystal Gems as it bristled its mane. Then it retreated back to its swarm, and they resumed shrieking together.

“You can drop the hologram now,” Peridot said imperiously. “You aren’t fooling anybody, except maybe Pearl.”

As Pearl shot an irritated glance at Peridot that went ignored, Connie watched the entire room begin to shimmer. The walls wavered as though they were part of a desert mirage. When reality stopped wobbling around them, the walls straightened, and the Centipeetles were gone. No mark of them, or their acid drool, remained.

Flint solidified out of the fading image of the burning sapling. A nimbus of fire still surrounded her, making her poofy red hair dance in the flames. She lowered her hand from a reddened eye surrounded by a dark bruise and sneered at the Crystal Gems. “Well, aren’t you all a clever lot of gravel?” she snarled.

Next to her, the boulder had become Milky Quartz, who rose up from sitting on the deck to tower over her compatriot. Her large, misproportioned right fist settled onto the muddy floor with a decisive thump. “Hey! You weren’t supposed to find us!” the hulking Quartz said sternly, as if to admonish them.

Peridot sniffed, and waved a hand at the wall above the empty doorway at the far side of the hold. Following the gesture, Connie saw a clean, polished, metallic hemisphere adhered to the wall, too new and different to have been a part of the wreckage.

“As if I wouldn’t recognize a multi-spatial holographic projection?” scoffed Peridot. “We used them all the time in the Kindergarten to watch the gladiator matches. Uh, I mean, instructional videos! We used them for instructional videos!” she hurried to correct herself. Then, frowning, she mused aloud, “Wait. I’m a Crystal Gem now. I’m supposed to break the rules.”

“Oh, we’re gonna break much more than rules, you little pebble,” Flint growled, and started forward.

A practiced bad thought pushed light from Jade’s stone, and Connie drew her sailcloth sword into ready hands. All around her, the Crystal Gems did likewise, pulling weapons and setting themselves into a battle line, behind which Peridot promptly scampered. The synchronized display was enough to stop Flint in her tracks and snuff out her aura of fire.

“What did you do with the Centipeetles?” Steven demanded over the rounded top of his shield.

“Meh-meh-meh-meh-centi-meh-meh!” Flint retorted, mimicking his words back at him in a squeaky whine. “Shut your noise flapper! We got them out of our way, just like we’re about to do to you, you little squidger.”

“Dude, come on. We’ve done this before,” Amethyst sighed as she pulled her whip taut between her fists. “You say something mean, we say something cool, we kick your butt, and you run away.”

“That last part isn’t happening this time,” Garnet added, and lifted her gauntlets.

“Oh, isn’t it?” Flint retorted.

Milky Quartz glanced at her in confusion and said, “Isn’t it?”

Exasperated, Flint said, “No, stupid! Because this time, we have…this!”

Reaching into her tunic, Flint drew out a glowing golden orb. She clutched it in her spindly fingers, grinning maliciously at Connie and the rest. Immediately, Connie’s blood ran cold with recognition.

It was exactly like the golden orb she, Peridot, and Lapis had found waiting for them in the Moon Base.

“Drop it,” Garnet said warningly, aiming her gauntlets and preparing to launch them.

“Gladly,” said Flint, tipping her hand.

“Don’t drop it!” Connie and Peridot shrieked in unison, too late.

The orb rolled out of Flint’s grasp, struck the floor without bouncing, and continued rolling. As with the previous orb on the Moon, Connie watched this orb pulling at the floor beneath it, scooping up dirt and debris into a thickening skin that swallowed the golden light. The orb zigzagged, rolling into the wall, then climbing up it, crackling as it ripped the dry vines and moss into itself, weaving the fibers into limbs. Once it had enough mass, it yanked a jagged corner of one hull plate out of the bulkhead with a thunderclap of rending metal as the now-enormous orb leapt from the wall.

What landed on the deck was Gem-like, but not a Gem. She had thick arms and legs woven tightly from vines, and the broad-shouldered build of a Quartz. Brown moss clung to her body in an approximation of leggings and shirt, with a diamond-shaped keyhole cutout revealing the smooth, round rock Amethyst had thrown set in her chest as a faux gemstone. Long, wavy hair made of vines spilled down her back, and a beautiful face sculpted from dirt and moss opened glowing golden eyes to gaze placidly at the Crystal Gems. The broken corner of hull plating loomed in her hand, bent into the shape of a long, sharp dueling sword.

Her lips parted, and a melodious voice emerged. “I,” she said, “am Citrine Two-Oh-One-Gee, Cut One-Ay-Three.”

“Uhh…hi?” Steven squeaked from behind his shield.

Amethyst’s arms flashed as she reached back through the door behind them and flung another rock, this time at the strange creature newly built before them. “Fastball!” she cried.

The creature calling herself Citrine gestured. Impossibly fast, the deck plating in front of her wrenched itself free from its bolts and, in a spray of crusty dirt, flipped upward to stand as a barrier. Amethyst’s rock bounced harmlessly off of the plate. Then the deck plate clattered thunderously to the floor as Citrine released her power over it with another gesture. 

“Shieldmaiden to the Diamonds,” continued Citrine, “I held fast against any who would threaten our beloved Homeworld.”

“Ha!” Flint crowed. “How do you like that, you rotten Off-Color! You really—”

A third rock caught Flint in her other eye, knocking her fully off her feet. Milky Quartz reacted quickly, catching Flint with her oversized hand while the spindly Gem cursed and clutched at her face again. 

“Fastball,” Amethyst grunted, and let her glowing arm retract back into shape.

“Why?” Flint screamed from behind her hands, cradling her face.

Amethyst shrugged. “Because comedy comes in threes?”

Unperturbed by Flint’s stoning, Citrine continued to speak with a calm resonance that filled the space. “Last of the Quartzes to be created, my line was meant to surpass and correct the mistake of the Rose Quartz.”

Connie watched those words pound into Steven. His shield dissipated, and his eyes went wide. “Rose Quartz?” he whispered.

Pearl was struck worse, and bent forward with her lips peeled back from her teeth. “Mistake?” she snarled.

“Would you stop gabbing and just shatter them already?” Flint howled, lowering her hands from her two blackened eyes.

Citrine chose to do both at once. Launching herself forward, the cobbled construct dove into the Crystal Gems’ formation. The rest of the Gems scattered, and Connie was about to do the same, when she noticed Steven still dumbstruck and frozen in the corner of her eye.

Connie shoved Steven out of harm’s way, then caught the swordstroke meant for him against her blade. The force of the blow drove Connie to one knee, and she struggled to hold the jagged edge of Citrine’s salvaged sword at bay. Gem strength, Gem strength, Gem strength! she chanted silently to her shaking arms. 

Inch by inch, the metal edge pushed closer to Connie’s scalp. She could feel Jade’s power straining inside of her, but the strength of a Jade seemed to be no concern for a Quartz soldier, real or fabricated. Her sailcloth sword trembled, rattling against Citrine’s blade.

A flash of white swept in front of Connie, and the pressure against her sword vanished. Her sword batted aside Citrine’s sword, and the weapon tumbled away with a hand made of vines still wrapped around its hilt. Leaping backwards, Connie saw Pearl still moving, sweeping into the space that Connie abandoned. Her graceful mentor’s first swipe had cleaved Citrine’s hand at the wrist. Her second strike rose in a vicious stab, plunging through Citrine’s stomach.

“Ha!” Pearl cried, angrier and haughtier than Connie had ever seen her. “Now who’s the mistake?”

Ever-calm, Citrine stood tall with Pearl’s spear through her stomach. As seconds ticked by, Pearl lost her smirk, realizing that her foe would not be poofed as so many others had been on the end of her weapon.

Citrine reached down with her remaining hand and grasped the haft of the spear. “From the ashes of the failed rebellion, I and my sisters rose,” declared Citrine. With a sharp gesture, she ripped the spear out of herself and cast it aside, sweeping Pearl along with it. The lithe, pale Gem cried out as she spun through the air in a blur of limbs and spear.

As Connie found her footing again, she felt the deck beneath her begin to quake. She looked to the source of the tremors, and saw Milky Quartz barrelling across the open hold. The mountain of a Gem summoned her hammerhead around her oversized fist in a flash of light, lifting it to bring down on Steven. The stocky teen was still collecting himself from where he’d fallen from Connie’s shove, and yelped at the sight of the immense hammer descending upon him.

“Steven!” Connie cried.

At the last moment, Steven’s shield manifested over his arms upraised. The shield rang with a deafening toll as it shuddered under Milky’s hammer. “No fair! You’re supposed to be squished!” Milky complained, and lifted her massive weapon to make good on her threat.

Even as Connie ran, she saw another white blur whirl past her and slam into Milky, knocking the huge warrior off-balance. As it ricocheted, the whirling white shape unfurled into Amethyst, whose whip lashed out and caught Milky’s smaller arm. Yanking on her studded whip, Amethyst reeled herself out of her rebound and into a flying kick that pounded Milky’s craggy jaw, toppling the larger Gem at Amethyst’s feet as she landed.

With her sailcloth sword, Connie ran to join Amethyst, ready to drive her blade into the titanic Quartz until she poofed. But a prickle of heat at the back of her neck sent a surge of fear through Connie that tangled her legs. She could feel the air expanding behind her, only to vanish into some column of emptiness that streaked toward her. Without looking, she pulled at the air, creating a channel of wind sweeping away from her.

As she tripped and fell, Connie saw the light of the flames. Her shadow leapt ahead of her, growing long and jittery in the harsh glow. Twisting, she landed on her back, facing the way she’d run from, and saw Flint channeling a sideways pillar of fire at her. The winds Connie conjured swallowed Flint’s fire and carried it up and away from Connie. A crackling blaze slammed into the distant ceiling of the hold, setting alight the web of vines and moss that had died there centuries ago. 

Flint sneered and stalked toward Connie. The air around the lanky Gem sucked inward as Flint lit her fists again, ready to summon another blaze. “Now where did we leave off? Oh, that’s right…” Flint growled.

A second firestorm launched from Flint’s hands. Connie tried to sweep this new blast into another defensive gust. But before she needed to, something large and dark jumped into the path of the flames and caught the blast against crossed arms. Squinting into the inferno, Connie could make out a square shape topping the silhouette that had saved her.

Garnet stood unruffled as Flint’s flame blast ended. The tall, powerful, fireproof Gem lowered her gauntlets and strode forward wordlessly.

Flint watched her own expression wither in the mirror of Garnet’s visor. “Oh, bother…” Flint grumbled, before Garnet’s massive fist sent her flying.

Someone behind Connie grasped at her arm. She swung her sword around, stopping barely in time to keep from stabbing a frightened, recoiling Peridot. “Connie Jade!” Peridot exclaimed as she helped Connie to her feet.

As she steadied herself with Peridot’s help, Connie caught sight of Citrine only now reaching her disembodied hand, and realized with a jolt that the entire fight had only started a few seconds ago. The muddy, mossy Gem-like creature bent and pushed the empty stump of her arm into the severed wrist of the hand still clutching her improvised sword. The vines shifted and reknit, and suddenly Citrine had two working hands again. She straightened, hefting her sword, and continued to speak as though nothing had happened. “Our might would ensure that the word of the Diamonds would never again be challenged.”

“I don’t know where you’re getting your information from,” Garnet told the construct, “but it’s wrong.” And she charged Citrine, bellowing a warcry as she lifted her fist to strike down the strange being.

Citrine gestured, and another deck plate snapped up from the floor, stopping Garnet’s fist cold. From around the side of the surprise barrier, Citrine spun and swung to carve Garnet’s head from her shoulders. Sparks erupted as Garnet caught the sword against her gauntlet and deflected the blow, then darted forward, trying to slip inside Citrine’s guard to deliver a knockout punch. But another motion from Citrine pulled a new deck plate up to catch Garnet’s attack and drive her backward.

“I’ve figured it out, Connie Jade,” Peridot insisted as they stood at the center of the melee. “That being is not a real Citrine.”

Connie watched the dry vines of Citrine’s godiva hair whirling around in a dancer’s swordplay. “We were already pretty sure about that, Peridot,” Connie noted dryly.

“She’s a simulacrum!” insisted Peridot. “A representation of an actual Gem made from inert material, and powered by whatever that yellow thing inside of her is. A Gem homunculus. A—”

“Gemunculus,” Amethyst grunted, lashing her whip at Milky Quartz to drive the huge Gem backwards into Steven’s waiting shield bash.

Steven barrelled shield-first through the back of Milky’s knee, once more toppling her to the floor. “Gemunculus! Nice one, Amethyst!” he cried.

Peridot yanked at her triangle of hair and screamed, “Gah! I was building up to it! But yes, a Gemunculus. She’s demonstrating a Citrine’s ability to summon barriers, and using their preferred weapon construct. Luckily, I don’t think this thing can replicate a real Citrine’s electrical discharge powers or psychic manipulation. We’d be in real trouble if it could…”

Spear twirling, Pearl circled around a wary Flint. “And how does all of that help us?” Pearl called irritably.

“It doesn’t,” taunted Flint. Sparks rained from her fists as she set them ablaze and swung them upon Pearl. “Now fry!”

Pearl spun gracefully out from under Flint’s blast of fire and swept her spear in an effortless arc, cutting a deep line across Flint’s shin and sending the Quartz hopping backwards.

“Ow!” snarled Flint. “Now fr—”

The second blast of fire burned across the hold and melted a crater into the far bulkhead. It never touched Pearl, who ducked and weaved past Flint’s hands. Her spear whirled and caught the snarling Quartz at either shoulder, leaving deep, dark marks where the tip carved into Flint.

“Ow! OW!” Flint howled, and gathered an inferno between her hands. “Now—”

Pearl’s spear slapped Flint’s hands to the deck, snuffing their flames. Then her speartip hammered down through one of Flint’s hands, pinning her there.

“AUGH! What idiot gave a weapon to a Pearl?” Flint roared, pulling uselessly at the spear with her unpinned hand.

Boldly, proudly, Pearl looked down at the raging Quartz and declared, “I did!”

“Well, cheers to you, little bauble!” the kneeling warrior snapped. Then Flint’s entire body erupted in white-hot fire. 

Pearl abandoned her spear and leapt backwards as heat swamped the entire compartment, turning the stale air acrid. The spear became a sliver of shadow in the flames, visible for only a brief moment before it crumbled and vanished. Once unpinned, Flint rose from the deck and chased after Pearl, launching a hail of firebolts at the retreating Gem.

Connie summoned her winds, ready to rush to the aid of her mentor, when Peridot’s hand caught her by the elbow. “This fight is pointless!” insisted Peridot.

“Easy for you to say!” Amethyst retorted. She’d hung in Milky Quartz’s outsized fist, being squeezed out of shape like a purple stress ball, while Steven hammered fruitlessly with his shield at Milky’s legs. Shapeshifting a new pair of comically long arms out of her exposed shoulders, Amethyst began to pummel Milky about the head.

“Ow! Owie! Quit punching me!” Milky whined, trying to duck under Amethyst’s punches while maintaining her grip on the tinier Quartz.

“Okay.” With another rush of white light, Amethyst’s noodly arms became noodly legs, which began to kick Milky’s head mercilessly.

“Ow-w-w-w! I think you misunderstood what I wanted!” cried Milky.

Again, Connie tried to join the fray, and again, Peridot held her back. “Connie Jade, we need to focus! The only reason they’re here is for the triweave plastanium. If these two bunglers are still here, that means the rest of them must still be here too! They could be getting away with it while we waste time here!”

“Says you!” Flint snarled as she hounded Pearl with flames. “Maybe we’re here to set a trap and rid the galaxy of you lot once and for all!”

“Really?” Milky said from underneath an umbrella of Amethyst’s kicks. “We should go tell Zircon and Polarite and Pyrite, then. They think we’re still guarding the door.”

“Milky, you brainless f—aaaahhh!” Flint’s curse ended in a scream, her flames vanishing as Pearl’s new spear landed in her foot, thrown with inhuman precision from outside the reach of Flint’s fire. “I swear, I’m going to send what’s left of you back to your owner in a goblet of ashes!”

Gauntlets crashed against metal barriers as Garnet pressed her attack against the faux Citrine. “She’s right,” the fusion grunted, slamming her armored knuckles fruitlessly against another uplifted deck plate. 

“Hey!” Amethyst shouted. “Nobody owns Pearl! And nobody gets to put her in a goblet, whatever that is! HURK!” Her eyes bulged and her voice choked as Milky squeezed her into an oblong purple mass.

“‘Peridot’ is right,” Garnet amended. “Steven, Connie, you two follow Peridot inside.”

“But we have to stay and help!” Steven leapt into the air, floating at Milky’s eye-level, and swung his shield’s edge as hard as he could into the Quartz’s temple. The impact rocked Milky, forcing her to drop Amethyst as she lurched aside. But Steven, kept aloft by his powers, sailed away from the force of his own blow, tumbling through the air.

Through Jade’s gemstone, Connie felt the path Steven cut across the air. She reached out with her half-hollow to tease the air, shaping the breeze so that Steven landed beside her. Careful of where she held her blade, she caught Steven as best she could, twisting him until his sandals met the floor again. 

“Peridot knows what they’re looking for,” Pearl said. She grunted as her spear met a fresh javelin that Flint drew from her gemstone, catching Pearl’s weapon on the haft of the slender black rod. “And you two know how to keep each other safe,” Pearl added, tossing them a smile over her shoulder.

“And keep Peridot safe too!” the little green engineer added fearfully.

Rolling her eyes, Pearl shrugged, and blocked Flint’s whirling javelin. “Yes, I suppose…”

As Connie released Steven, he nodded gratefully, and settled his shield back into place to protect them both. “But we should stick toge—”

“Steven,” Connie said, startling him with her forceful tone. “Listen to them. They can handle this. We need to stop Pyrite! …and the other Gems. From getting what they came for.”

Her stomach twisted in knots as she watched Steven’s stubborn expression wilt. In truth, a large part of her wanted to do as he did, sticking together and dealing with this first threat before they went looking for another. 

But aside from Peridot’s sound reasoning, Connie knew her real motivation for wanting to delve deeper into the wrecked ship.

Milky had mentioned Pyrite. She was there, somewhere in the ship.

Connie tucked the grim desire for retribution into her half-hollow, where she could use it later, and took Peridot by the hand. “Come on,” she said, and dragged the smaller Gem behind her in a run for the hatch at the far wall of the compartment.

As Steven reluctantly followed, shouldering his cheeseburger backpack, Connie saw Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl backing toward each other. Milky, Flint, and the Citrine Gemunculus advanced, closing in on the trio.

“Since my creation,” declared Citrine, “no force has opposed our empire, and the Diamonds’ word remains absolute law.”

“So, can we actually handle this?” Amethyst quipped.

The last thing Connie heard as she led the charge into a darkened corridor was Garnet’s answer. “We’ll see.”

Chapter Text

Save for one tiny sliver, the whole of Connie was focused on thoughts of finding Pyrite as she followed Peridot and Steven deeper into the wrecked colony ship. Her heart beat to a rhythm of vengeance, her fingers tightening around the hilt of her sailcloth sword as she imagined it plunging into her golden foe. 

But that one sliver of a different thought lingered, and only grew louder when Steven unknowingly voiced the exact same thought: “If the ship is sideways on the ground,” he puffed, his stubby legs struggling to keep up with Peridot and Connie, “then how are we standing on the floor?”

Peridot led the way, zigging and zagging from one darkened corridor to the next. They passed empty hatchways whose doors had long ago collapsed in disrepair or been busted through by curious Centipeetles. Other compartments flashed by, some with strange machinery, still others empty like the large hold they’d gone through to enter the colony ship. But Peridot didn’t seem concerned with any of them, and kept running toward someplace deeper within the vessel.

“Gem structures are designed to synchronize with our innate ability to adapt to other environments,” Peridot explained. “It’s called—”

“—adaptive architecture,” Connie finished, as she recalled the ancillary bunker she and Garnet had patrolled. 

Peridot flashed Connie a pleased look over her shoulder. “Exactly right, Connie Jade!”

“So we’re actually running up a—WHOA!” As Steven spoke the thought aloud, his sandals suddenly lost purchase on the floor beneath him, and he began falling backwards.

Connie caught Steven by the wrist. Her whole body jerked as she twisted and pulled, stopping Steven from falling back down the hallway. He dangled sideways, reaching up to clasp her hand in both of his. Shock filled his expression, then confusion, and finally, gratitude. 

He hung there a moment, dangling horizontally in Connie’s hand, as they stared at each other. From under the hem of his shirt, a pink glow flickered, painting the floor beneath him in a warm color. Connie felt that warmth spread up from the floor, through her feet, through her hand clutched in his, into her stomach, all the way to her cheeks.

Stevonnie would make short work of Pyrite.  

The thought emerged from her vengeful focus. But then the thought became larger, driving a wedge through the dark miasma inside her. Stevonnie wasn’t meant just for battle. They were meant to laugh, and cry, and explore. They were meant to live. And it would feel so, so good to simply live as Stevonnie again, even for a moment.

But Jade’s gemstone remained dark. Her hand remained her own, and Steven’s, his. If it were possible, they already would have fused, if for no other reason than that Connie wanted it. But apparently, Jade’s gemstone wanted something different.

Cheeks cooling, thoughts refocused, Connie dipped Steven back toward the wall, waiting impatiently as he fumbled his sandals back onto the deck. “It works better if you don’t think about it,” she advised him.

He nodded, and hid almost all of his disappointment as his gem’s glow extinguished. “Thanks,” he said.

“We have to hurry!” Peridot insisted, and waved frantically for them to follow. “We have to honor the sacrifice that Garnet, Amethyst, and the rest have made for us to stop Shard’s forces!”

“They’re not dead, Peridot!” cried Steven, scrambling to catch up to her.

“Good! Keep that trademark Steven optimism alive. It’ll soften the crushing emotional fallout of their loss,” Peridot said with an encouraging thrust of her fist.

Three more twisting and turning corridors later, Peridot led them toward a hatch leading to a much larger chamber. Unlike the dim secondhand light seeping through gaps in the ship and reflecting down the metal corridors, the chamber beyond the hatch was fully illuminated. Through the empty doorway, Connie could see glimpses of large crystal cogs and metallic pistons, all grown over by the same dry, wispy moss and vines that had overgrown everything else. 

Peridot stopped them with her arms outspread, training her gaze on the glowing doorway. “That’s it,” she hissed to Connie and Steven. “The power core. If they’re here for plastanium, that’s where they’ll be.”

“Okay,” Steven said, and nodded. “So, should we sneak, or—”

Connie lifted her blade and charged.

She could have justified her choice to the stunned Peridot and Steven behind her with a number of rational explanations. Their footfalls on the deck plating had been echoing up and down the ship’s corridors while they were running, and surely must have been heard already. Flint’s and Milky’s vigil at the ship’s entrance would probably alert the rest of Shard’s forces of any enemy’s approach even before their holographic trick failed. 

The truth, however, lived in that miasma of vengeance swirling inside of Connie, a feeling that coalesced into the rage driving her forward as fast as her legs would carry her.

She had trained hard, unlocked new powers, waited with unbearable patience. And now she would finish what Pyrite had started in Ascension. 

Emerging through the empty hatchway, Connie came into a broad, round, high*-ceilinged chamber. Those crystal cogs she had glimpsed were at rest on the wall, their jewel-like teeth woven between one another, waiting to perform some function Connie couldn’t imagine. Coils of pipes and cables made up the walls in which the cogs hung, a confusing gnarl of conduits designed to carry power from the chamber to the rest of the ship. All of the conduit spiraled around the edge of the chamber and wove together into an intricate web across the ceiling that came together in the extremely literal heart of the room.

At the room’s center loomed an enormous crystal heart. Arteries twisted out from the bulk of the amorphous shape to connect to the largest of the conduits in the ceiling. Connie envisioned the crystal at full power casting a brilliant red glow that could fill the chamber.. But the crystal hung dead and white, cloudily translucent, with a fissure that nearly cut its shape in half. Whatever had knocked the ship out of the sky had cracked the heart, and its power had bled away ages before Connie had even been born.

On second glance, Connie wondered if she even would have seen the heart, were the ship still intact. Beneath the heart rested a large pedestal, around which a series of ancient Gem workstations were attached. A series of large, black curved plates extended up from the top of the pedestal, with empty fittings at the top of the plates, as though additional plating was meant to extend off of it to encompass the crystal heart in a big, black, conical cylinder. Connie could deduce the shape and scope of the shell that had been around the heart because stacks of more plating sat on the floor behind the two Gems who were in the process of disassembling the rest of it.

“No, no, that’s the microspanner! I told you to hand me the decoupler!” snarled Polarite. The pale yellow Gem’s gaunt face was flushed with effort. The shallow white-flecked yellow pyramidal gemstone set high in her forehead glinted under some lingering ambient light coming from the dead heart above her. The white lab coat draped over her slender form was marred with black burns and holes. “We’ve done this for weeks. How are you still not understanding the difference?”

On the other side of the low cylinder wall, Zircon frowned and stared at each of the tools she clutched in her hands. The two objects looked like identical silver ice picks, and she held them daintily at arm’s length in her fingertips. “I’m sorry! Maybe we could label them?” the shorter Gem whined. Her large, pink, cotton candy afro swayed as she looked between either tool helplessly.

“Label them?” snapped Polarite. “Do you need me to label your left and right hands so you can tell the diff—? HOSTILE FAUNA!” The surly Gem’s eyes widened when she saw Connie charging straight at them. 

Connie roared and leapt, driving her sword at the pair of enemy Gems, who flung apart to avoid her sailcloth blade. The sword struck the curved panel Polarite had been working to dismantle, and gouged a shallow wedge out of it amidst a shower of sparks as Connie drew her blade out of the low wall and brought her weapon to bear on the cowering Zircon.

“Where’s Pyrite?” Connie snarled. The tip of her sword stopped cold beneath Zircon’s chin.

Tears welled up behind Zircon’s owlish pink glasses as she froze in place, crossing her eyes to follow the path of the blade aimed at her throat. “Sh-Sh-She’s just warped out w-w-w-with a load of p-p-plates,” the slight Gem stammered. Moving as little as possible, she pointed a single finger to her left.

Connie never took her eyes off of Zircon, but let her attention drift into her periphery. There, next to the stack of scavenged plates, was a large purple disc on the floor. Its diameter spanned perhaps two meters, and it hovered less than an inch above the floor, perfectly level. 

It took Connie several seconds to recognize the item: it was the same kind of disc that Milky Quartz had carried when she’d tracked Connie to school, although this one was far larger. She remembered Flint attempting to deploy one in her failed one-Gem assault on the beach house shortly thereafter. At the time, Connie had guessed the objects were portable warp pads, something that had been impossible during the original Gem war. Apparently, she had been correct in her guess, and apparently, the discs could expand and contract into something more portable.

“I-I-I could go get her, i-if you like,” Zircon continued, and offered Connie a painfully obsequious smile.

Scrambling back to her feet, Polarite aimed her spindly yellow fingers at Connie. The segmented digits merged together into a U-shaped magnetic array at the end of Polarite’s sleeve. “Zircon, you have to assert yourself to the local fauna! Like so!”

Polarite’s magnet hummed. Connie felt a prickling in the air, and grinned.

Tense seconds ticked by as nothing happened. Frustrated, Polarite smacked at the forearm of her bulbous sleeve and said, “Wait. This worked before!”

Connie had remembered her first encounter with the more studious of Shard’s henchwomen, especially the way Polarite had used magnetic fields to manipulate the fully metal sword she’d carried at the time. From her slip-on sneakers to her all cotton T-shirt, Connie had divested herself of any metal. And thanks to an incredibly strict dental hygiene regiment enforced by her mother, she had no fillings to pull at, either. 

Though she doubted any dentist still actually used metal fillings. But being on the No Cavities picture collage of her dentist’s waiting room wall remained a point of pride.

“Uhh…” Polarite said, relaxing her array back into floating fingers. “What I meant to say is…be brave, Zircon!” And she hurdled the dismantled wall on the pedestal to sprint for the door, her white coat billowing behind her.

“Zircons aren’t brave! We just administrate the bravery of others!” Zircon sobbed, stiffening to keep still at Connie’s swordpoint.

As she reached the hatch, Polarite folded in half around a translucent pink shield and bounced backwards onto the floor, sprawled before Steven and Peridot as the pair barreled into the chamber. The two Crystal Gems stood tall in the hatchway, scanning the room for dangers, poised to oppose whatever threat next came their way. Then they both collapsed, bracing themselves against their knees as they huffed wearily.

“How is she so fast?” Peridot wheezed. Though she had no breath to lose, her face had shifted to a deeper shade of green, and her legs wobbled underneath her.

“She…jogs…every…day…” Steven replied, gasping between each breath. His eyes flicked up to Connie with a look of relief at seeing her intact, which made Connie’s stomach churn with momentary guilt before she stuffed the feeling into her half-hollow. Then his gaze continued past her, and he straightened, his eyes widening in alarm. “Centi!”

Without turning her head, Connie’s eyes followed Steven’s. At the very edge of her vision, she saw a cluster of colorful bubbles floating near the ceiling of the far wall. Each bubble cradled a spherical gemstone inside, stones which could only belong to the Centipeetles inhabiting the ship. When Flint had said they’d gotten the corruptions out of their way, she’d been far more literal than Connie had imagined, tucking the poofed Centipeetles into the far edge of the compartment.

Polarite ran a hand through her black flattop hair, gaping up in shock at the new arrivals who had bowled her to the floor. “Wait a tick… This isn’t an invasion of local fauna, it’s an attack! Which means these are more Gem-augmented organics! But why is a Peridot overseeing them?”

Pulling herself upright, Peridot glared down imperiously at the yellow Gem. “Ugh, they have a Polarite?” she said.

Polarite shambled to her feet and aimed her arm at the pair in the hatchway. Her fingers coalesced again, this time into a five-barreled rotating energy weapon, the tip of which glowed with the promise of danger. Bracing her hand against the forearm of her weapon, Polarite sneered, and said to Peridot, “I was mistaken. Since these servitors have weapons, I assume they’re in charge of you. Were you sent to dismantle something? I could have used a wrench-cranker like you five solar cycles ago when we started this catastrophic endeavor.”

Peridot stepped behind Steven and his shield, peering around the edge of her protector to laugh in Polarite’s face. “It took you five days to do this much? What, did you spend the first four theorizing about a better tool for the job? Hold a conference with a dozen other Polarites about which plate to start with?” she jeered.

Photonic sweat poured down Zircon’s face, making her huge glasses slip down her nose. “I think we’re losing focus here!” she called across the room, still frozen in terror at the end of Connie’s sword.

Connie lifted the sword’s tip to rest beneath Zircon’s chin. “I’m only going to ask one more time,” she said through her teeth. “Where is—?”

The purple disc on the floor erupted with a column of light. A lean, tall, strong silhouette emerged from the brightness. When the light vanished again, Pyrite stood on the portable warp pad, her expression one of pleasant boredom. “Okay, let’s get this last load…” Quickly, her face broke with astonishment at the sight of Polarite and Zircon under the threat of the three new enemies. “What in the Empty Sky happened? I was gone for two millicrons!”

Peridot lifted onto her toes as she drew a long, long, long gasp, and then screamed, “OH MY STARS, IT’S REALLY YOU!”

Pyrite’s brows dipped behind her visor in confusion. “Uhhh, hi?”

“You’re incredible! Impossible!” gushed Peridot. “I’ve seen all your matches! Your one-on-six bout with the Ruby Rumble! The knockout punch that dissipated Iron-Knuckle Carnelian! That grappling contest with Amethyst Nine-Tee-Kay that lasted eight days! I mean, I only watched the highlights of that last one, but still! Would you sign my visor? Ooh! Can I try on your cape?”

The half-hollow inside of Connie roiled with every bad thought she could remember. Feelings of helplessness when Pyrite had tossed her around the strawberry battlefield. Feelings of despair at losing the sword of Rose Quartz, the hilt of which still loomed above Pyrite’s shoulder where she had tied it to her back. Connie stared into the reflective visor covering Pyrite’s eyes, seeing herself mirrored back at her, her own expression of rage and hurt and hate. And the doors to her half-hollow burst off their mental hinges as all of it came rushing out of Connie in a furious battlecry that shook the air as she lunged at Pyrite.

In one smooth motion, Pyrite spun out of the path of Connie’s sword, continued the motion full-circle, and slapped Connie between the shoulders. The light blow sent Connie sprawling onto the cold deck plating, her sword clattering in her hand as her chin struck the floor. 

Connie snarled and threw herself off the deck, rising and turning to see Pyrite leap back from the purple pad. The massive golden gladiator reached under the black cape draped across one shoulder, up to her hidden gemstone, and in a flash of light drew her enormous double-headed axe.

“Careful, Pyrite,” Polarite cautioned the bigger Gem. “These are more animal servitors that those psychotic rebels have augmented with captured enemy gemstones. They’ve somehow learned to utilize their Gems’ intrinsic constructs for weapons.”

Stamping her foot, Peridot snarled at Polarite, “Hey! They aren’t animals! They’re human-Gem hybrids! And they aren’t servitors! They’re more like my subordinates, or slightly less important but still important teammates!”

Pyrite’s visor lingered on Connie, reflecting her smoldering glare back at her while a smile crept across the Gem’s mouth. “We’ve fought this one before, thinker,” Pyrite rumbled. “She’s the one who came with that fusion to blow up your equipment when you arrived. I think we fought the other one at Ascension, too. Her, I don’t remember as much.”

“I go by he/him, actually,” Steven said from behind his shield.

“A pleasure to meet you, Heehym.” No longer under direct threat, Zircon paced slowly behind the protection of Pyrite and her axe. The pink Gem’s curly-toed shoes scraped against the deck as she sidled her way to the portable warp pad. As she eased herself atop it, she said, “Right, then! New plan: you two can take care of the Peridot, the sword-one, and Heehym, while I secure the rest of the plating back at the Celerity Forge!”

“What?” Polarite glanced back at the cowardly pink Gem in disbelief. “Zircon, you—”

“Don’t-forget-to-bring-the-portable-pad-back-with-you-through-the-regular-pad-we-still-need-it-okay-byeeee!” Zircon said hurriedly, and then disappeared into a glowing warp stream.

“—useless clod!” finished Polarite. “Ugh!”

“Polarite, take care of those two,” Pyrite said. Her smile widened, and she luxuriated in the grip of her axe, twisting her hands around its haft. “I think I have my hands full here,” she added, aiming her mocking tone at Connie.

“You’re not splitting us up!” Steven retorted, drawing upright. “We’re gonna take you down toge—”

“Steven,” Connie said, locking eyes with herself in the mirror of Pyrite’s visor, “I got this.”

Pyrite’s smile sharpened. “Do you?”

“Connie, wait!”

Steven’s voice was lost in Connie’s battlecry. With the wind at her back, she careened toward Pyrite, who hefted her axe and waited with indifference for Connie to take the first swing.

Somewhere behind her, Connie heard laser blasts deflecting off of Steven’s shield, heard Peridot’s frightened yelp and Steven’s noises of frustration. The months of training they had spent learning to fight together kept pulling at her, telling her to go back to Steven’s side and face the threat as they’d always promised they would: together.

But that Connie had been a mere human. Now she was more. She was strong enough to reclaim what had been taken from her.

Her sword rang against the flat of Pyrite’s axe. High, low, Connie swung her sailcloth sword, testing the large Gem’s defenses. The green blur of her sword never seemed to harry Pyrite, whose axe batted away Connie’s best efforts. Pyrite looked ready to yawn, which only enraged Connie more.

“So, you’re actually a Gem, right?” Pyrite said conversationally, backing away from Connie’s onslaught in a languid backwards stroll. “They just put you into some local creature to, I guess, hide you? What’s that all about?”

Connie snarled and knocked the axe aside in one mighty blow. The power of Jade’s gemstone coursed through her limbs, amplifying her strength beyond anything it had been before. But the motion overextended her guard, and she was helpless as Pyrite simply lifted a boot and kicked Connie hard in the chest. She landed on her tailbone, bouncing off the deck, her sword still clutched in one hand. Connie’s chest throbbed as she sucked in a breath, fighting to fill her lungs again. Through watery eyes, she saw Pyrite advancing on her, and she scrambled to her feet.

Still unhurried, Pyrite took an experimental swing at Connie, who hopped backwards out of the axe’s path. “How’d a Beryl end up with the rebels, anyway?” Pyrite continued. “If I remember, they made you pretty late in the war. I didn’t even know they made green ones, too! I’ve only met Red Beryls.”

“I’m not a Beryl!” Connie bellowed. Her half-hollow flexed, and she envisioned a path through the entire span of the chamber. The air pressure around her shifted, making her ears pop as a rising wind lifted her long hair off her shoulders. “I’m a Jade!”

A narrow tempest blasted through the room and slammed into Pyrite, knocking her off her feet and sending her axe spinning away into motes. The wind carried the big gladiator across the room and cratered her into the bulkhead. She shattered a cluster of crystal gears, then fell facedown onto the deck and lay there, motionless.

Connie started forward, grinding her fingers against the hilt of her sword as she felt the electric thrill of victory close at hand. But the fleeting moment of breathing room made her pause and glance back at Steven as worry overtook her thirst for vengeance.

“Look at this mess!” Peridot jeered as she ducked a wave of glowing bolts from Polarite’s arm cannon. With a gesture, Peridot lifted the entire stack of disassembled shielding plates sitting at the base of the broken crystal heart. The black metal plating soared into the gap between Peridot and Polarite, forming a wall that blocked the yellow Gem’s barrage entirely. “I’ve seen pebbles that could take apart a crystal core better than this!”

“Leave it to another pebble to stick up for her own kind!” Polarite’s cannon shifted back into a horseshoe magnetic emitter. A gesture from the taller Gem ripped the plates out of Peridot’s invisible grasp, and lifted the curved pieces back and up above her head. “You’re just about the smallest Peridot I’ve ever seen!” Another sharp gesture hurled the plates forward to crush Peridot under a solid wave of metal.

Peridot’s hands rose, trembling, as she caught the flying plates in her ferrokinesis. The wave of plates spun wide around Peridot as she redirected their momentum in a half-circle behind her, then sent them flying back at Polarite again. “I’m astonished you’ve left your laboratory long enough to even meet another Gem, you pompous, preening ponderer!” she snarled.

Polarite did just as Peridot had, catching and swinging the plates in a broad circle to fling them back at Peridot. The deadly attacks became a bizarre game of catch as they juggled the black, curved metal back and forth at each other. “It’s no wonder you rebelled. The most useful thing you could do for the Empire is to bring your own meager misunderstanding of mechanics to the enemy.”

“Why, you too-tall, teetering, talentless, t-uhh…CLOD!” screeched Peridot.

“YOU’RE the CLOD!” Polarite screeched back.

Standing in the midst of the flying plates, Steven jumped from side to side, narrowly missing the deadly spinning corners of the metal as it blurred past him from both directions. “I don’t usually say this, but can we please stop trying to talk this out? I don’t think it’s helping,” he pleaded breathlessly.

Connie hesitated, and started to turn back to rescue Steven from what had clearly stopped being a battle for the fate of the planet. Then a low, soft chuckle from across the compartment froze her in her tracks and turned her blood to ice. Her hair whipped behind her as she looked at Pyrite.

The massive golden gladiator crawled slowly back to her feet, her movements shaky. For a moment, Connie hoped that her blow had grievously injured Pyrite. But as the sounds of amusement grew, she realized that Pyrite was shaking with laughter.

Her cracked visor found Connie’s sinking expression, and Pyrite grinned. “Finally!” she crowed. “I’ve been waiting to see the gal who sent me flying at Ascension! Now it’s a fight!”

And Pyrite launched herself forward with impossible speed, sweeping a fresh axe from under her cape as she careened through the air at Connie. 

Even ready as she was for the attack, part of Connie froze at the sheer speed of such a large attacker. The Holo-Pearls she trained against were faster than almost any human. Pyrite made them all seem slow, moving in a golden blur, her boots rattling the deck plating up through the soles of Connie’s sneakers. 

But Connie had been practicing. Her eardrums strained with a pressure shift as her half-hollow pulled at the air. With a tiny hop, Connie darted to one side in a wind-jump, letting the gust carry her and throw her opponent off-balance, just as it had against the Holo-Pearls.

Pyrite didn’t even notice the pull of the air. Her steps never faltered, and she whirled through the gust, chasing Connie with her double-headed axe. Only a panicked block by her sword kept Connie’s head from leaving her body. The blow glanced off her blade, turning her hop into a tumble. She hit the deck with a bone-wracking clang and rolled, struggling to put her feet under her as she staggered upright again. If only she had a moment to catch her breath…

No such moment came. A lazy stroke of the axe slapped Connie’s sword from her hands. It bounced across the room, hopelessly out of reach. Pyrite swung again, this time aiming to split Connie in half at the waist. 

Desperate, Connie Gem-jumped and flipped, landing in a crouch on the high ceiling, gathering her legs beneath her—above her?—as she drove her frustration and fear through Jade’s gemstone to draw a new sword before she pushed off the ceiling into a diving lunge. Jade’s winds came with her, pushing Connie into superhuman speeds. She screamed, and swung with every iota of power in her body.

A brief flash of pressure pushed back against her sword before she landed, stumbling, on the deck. Connie heard a hiss of pain, and whirled to find Pyrite clutching her face. A chunk of the big Gem’s curtain of purple hair fluttered down to rest atop her boots. Her hand dropped, revealing an angry red slash that ran the length of her jawline.

Pyrite twisted her injured face into a grin. “Not bad,” she said.

Connie clenched her whole body to keep from trembling. She’d given everything she had, all to barely scratched Pyrite. 

The gladiator lunged again. Scrambling, Connie squeezed with her half-hollow, bombarding her retreat with air grenades. A vicious string of explosions shook the air, snapping Connie’s hair straight behind her as she wheeled backwards blindly. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The concussive air threw her faster still, staggering her, until her last grenade knocked her flat onto her back.

Pyrite walked through the blasts without so much as a stumble. The thunderclaps ruffled her hair, and forced her to grab at her visor lest it be blown off her face. But that was all.

Winding up, Pyrite slammed her axe down at Connie, who threw her feet in either direction to escape the deadly blade. The axe blow wrenched the deck plate up and out of the floor to flip in midair. As Connie threw herself off the deck in a bid to escape, Pyrite spun, catching the loose deck plate, spun full circle, and slapped Connie out of the air with it.

It didn’t hurt. Not at first. The deck plate struck Connie harder than any other single impact in her life, knocking her out of her body entirely. She imagined herself drifting ahead of her physical form, watching as an observer while her arms and legs trail like limp ribbons after the rest of her. She had to rush to keep ahead of her body as it streaked, comet-like, across the compartment.

The pain, strangely, crept in like an afterthought. A piercing, shrieking, throbbing, screaming, raging thing that swallowed all of her body at once. It replaced her bones, and skin, and even her hair, with the utter sensation that everything about her had been wrong, so wrong, to have allowed herself to be struck like that.

She slammed back into her body when it struck the far wall in the second-hardest impact she had ever felt. Crystal gears shattered, raining down around her as she crumpled to the deck. Eyes watering, she stared up at the cold ceiling, dimly aware of an array of colorful circles somewhere above her. Her fingers twitched, dimly aware that they should have been wrapped around a hilt. But her sword was long gone, and her half-hollow felt too far away to reach inside her numb body for a replacement.

Pyrite stepped over her, framed by the floating colors overhead. That long red slash on her cheek stretched around a vicious smile. Slowly, almost gently, Pyrite lifted one boot and planted it on Connie’s chest, resting the tip right over Jade’s gemstone at the hollow of Connie’s throat. Connie pulled feebly at the boot, trying to wrench it off of her to no avail.

“You should feel honored, Jade. Not every Gem gets added to my cape,” Pyrite said, and gestured to the glittering black fabric draped from her shoulder. As she leaned forward, the pressure on Connie’s chest intensified, driving the breath out of her as her ribs creaked beneath the gladiator’s weight. “It’ll be a real pleasure to mix your dust with the rest once I grind you under my heel.” And she pressed her foot down hard, focusing her weight on top of Jade’s gemstone.

She’s gonna be surprised when that dust comes with a lot of pulp. The thought did little to comfort Connie as her vision faded into blackness.

Suddenly, Pyrite whipped around, swinging her axe in a snap motion. Though her foot remained on Connie’s chest, the pressure lessened significantly as the gladiator shifted her weight to cleave in half some new attacker that had come flying at her from behind. 

The plush, rounded shadow in her vision being cut apart made Connie terrified that Steven had just sacrificed himself trying to save her. No! Steven, no! Connie wanted to scream, but the boot hardly let her draw a sliver of breath as it eased atop her.

Chips rained down on Connie, sticking to the thick tears covering her cheeks and peppering her hair with salty crumbs. She blinked hard, trying to clear her vision, and saw two halves of a cheeseburger backpack flump onto the ground beside her. Torn packaging from CHAAAAPS bags stuck out of its fabric like a grisly, crinkly disembowelment.

Covered in chips and crumbs just as Connie was, Pyrite looked back from where the backpack had been hurled. Connie’s watery gaze followed, and found Steven there. A fresh shield materialized over his arm as the gladiator leveled her axe at him. “You too? Looking to turn this into a tag-team match?” Pyrite chortled.

Steven’s face hardened with anger, a rare sight to Connie. She watched him set himself to battle, squaring his shoulders and lifting his shield. When he spoke, his voice emerged in as close to a growl as Connie had ever heard from him. “You,” he warned Pyrite, “love chips.”

The words gave Pyrite pause. She tilted her head and grunted, “What?”

“And I,” Steven continued, “love chips.”

“I don’t… What is this? What’s happening?” Pyrite looked down at Connie as if for an answer, which Connie wouldn’t have given, even if she’d had the breath, or had any idea of what Steven was doing.

“We love chips from CHAAAAPS! ” Steven bellowed, and flung his shield.

The spinning pink discus sailed high over Pyrite’s axe, over Pyrite’s head, posing no direct threat to the gladiator at all. Instead, Steven’s Gem weapon struck into the cluster of colored circles floating at the ceiling. And as Connie blinked, clearing her eyes, she realized where she was.

Right beneath the bubbled Centipeetle gemstones.

Steven’s shield mowed through the bubbles, popping them all at once. The freed gemstones rained down, bouncing off Pyrite to clatter onto the deck. Immediately, white light began to spill out of the stones, which hovered amidst the luminescence. The spherical stones became mouth-eyes once more as the Centipeetles reformed.

Pyrite snarled and jumped back as the pack of Centipeetles solidified into hissing, raging beasts. Acid dribbled down around Connie like rain as the shrieking corruptions turned upon the gladiator. They skittered after Pyrite, snapping and screaming, swiping with their forelegs, and snapping with the pincers at their ends. 

“Back! Back off!” Pyrite snarled, swiping with her axe at the ravening Centipeetles. “It’s going to take more than that to—”

A thudding, clanking flurry from down the corridor rose in volume and urgency, a steady noise of footfalls that drew rapidly closer. Through the empty hatchway, Flint and Milky Quartz charged into the compartment. Connie’s heart sank at the sight of them, knowing that, even with the Centipeetles on his side, Steven couldn’t hope to beat Pyrite and the two Quartzes.

“LLLeg iiiit!” Flint screamed.

“—to the pad, get to the pad, get to the pad—” Milky Quartz chanted fearfully as she ran.

Behind them, a third shape emerged from through the hatchway. Sliding backwards with her arms crossed in a guard, the Citrine Gemunculus skidded to a stop. She brandished her sword at whatever unseen threat had knocked her down the corridor. “From the ashes of the failed rebellion, I and my sisters rose,” Citrine said to no one in particular.

As Steven, Connie, and Pyrite all gaped in confusion, Milky Quartz piled onto the portable warp pad next to the broken crystal heart. Flint, unable to fit next to her on the pad, instead leapt into Milky’s arms, where the larger Gem cradled her like a baby.

“She’s your problem now, mud clump!” Flint jeered at Pyrite.

“Bye, Pyrite!” Milky sang and waved as the pad activated, whisking the pair up into a warp tunnel.

Across the room, Polarite had pinned Peridot underneath a piece of magnetized plating, and was trying to crush her opponent into the deck. Peridot, stubbornly un-crushed, had grasped one of Polarite’s boots, and had wrapped her jaws around the glossy limb in an attempt to bite it off. 

As she saw her Quartz guard vanish, Polarite snarled, “Enough of this manual labor!” Her spindly fingers wrapped around Peridot’s face, and she flung the little engineer across the room. Abandoning the remainder of her disassembled plating, Polarite leapt to the warp pad and likewise flashed into warp space.

 “Our might would ensure that the word of the Diamonds would never again be challenged,” said Citrine. She gestured to the floor ahead of her. Three deck plates wrenched free of their bolts, standing upright to form a triple layer of shielding between Citrine and the hatchway.

Pyrite wrenched herself free of the Centipeetle swarm, tossing the corruptions aside. She bowled through Steven as though he weren’t there, and leapt across the compartment to the purple pad at the heart of the room.

That mirrored visor found Connie across the room, and that same vicious smile bid her farewell. “See you in the rematch,” Pyrite said. She tossed her axe into the air, and then vanished into a warp tunnel.

From out of the corridor came a dark crimson giant. Her immense double-headed mallet smashed through all three of Citrine’s barriers in a single swipe. “Make way for Sardonyx!” the giant sang, and lifted her mallet again.

Prone, crumby, and breathless, Connie could only marvel at the sight of a fusion that, until now, she had only known through Steven’s stories. Black, sheer leggings, white half-sleeves, and a pompadour-shouldered tuxedo complete with bow tie made Sardonyx look to Connie like some kind of amalgamation of a stage magician and a glamorous dancer. But with four arms, and four eyes that glimmered behind smoky black lenses, she was unmistakably a fusion. A tight bob of blond hair framed her grinning face as she looked down upon Citrine with gushing, joyous disdain.

“Since my creation,” said Citrine, “no force has opposed—”

Sardonyx’s fists-shaped mallet came down on Citrine, obliterating the Gemunculus. Dirt and vines exploded from beneath the hammer blow, obscuring the tiny golden orb that escaped the carnage. 

“That’s quite enough of that,” Sardonyx declared.

The golden orb bounced across the deck and rolled just short of where Peridot lay sprawled. Before the orb could begin to roll again and re-gather any of the materials in the room, Peridot leapt up and stomped down on it with both feet. Its glow fizzled and evaporated as the mote squashed beneath the little engineer.

“Yes! I defeated the Gemunculus!” cheered Peridot.

Pyrite’s axe flipped end over end in a lazy arc that brought it back down atop the portable warp pad. The blade skrunked through the metallic purple material, cleaving the pad in half as the axe buried itself into the floor.

A white blur sped into the room as Amethyst spin-dashed after Sardonyx. The stocky purple Quartz brandished her whip, then sagged in disappointment as she saw what remained of the battle. “Aw, man! You didn’t leave me any?” she groaned at Sardonyx.

“I’m afraid they uncovered a wealth of good sense to share amongst themselves,” Sardonyx lamented, grinning, “because they ran as soon as they saw me. Ha! Oh, and look, the children found the Centipeetles!”

As Connie lay on the floor, still trying to remind her aching body of how it used to move for her, she felt little pinches and tugs that pulled at her clothes and her hair. Her eyes rolled up to find two of the Centipeetles fussing over her. Now that their enemy had fled, they seemed content to clean up the CHAAAAPS littering Connie’s body.

Steven ran his fingers through the thick mane of another Centipeetle who’d wrapped itself around him. “Aw, I missed you too,” he said, and patted carefully around its dripping maw of acid. The pair of them walked together, awkwardly entangled, to hover over Connie. “Are you okay?”

Connie summoned the full force of her remaining breath, and answered, “Nuhhh…”

Licking his fingers, Steven began to lightly touch Connie’s exposed skin. The dollops of healing cascaded through her, little palliative raindrops that rippled through her body until she felt whole enough to rise. Steven helped her sit up on the deck, both of them moving carefully so as not to spook the Centipeetles daintily cleaning the crumbs off of her.

Once Connie was upright again, Steven’s attention fell to the torn halves of his cheeseburger backpack. His expression grew wistful as he took up the halves and hugged them to his chest. “Thank you, cheeseburger backpack. You were the best storage solution I ever had,” he eulogized solemnly. “You could hold more stuff than my pockets, and you were easier to take with me than Lion, because you didn’t just get up and walk away when I needed something. Rest now, friend.”

Connie felt his voice fading away as he mourned the loss of some stupid novelty backpack. Her eyes were glued to the spot where Pyrite had vanished, taking with her Rose Quartz’s sword and their best chance at finding out why Shard wanted the crystal hearts of the Celerity Forge. 

See you in the rematch.

It had barely been a match at all. Pyrite had humiliated her all over again, worse even than their fight at the strawberry battlefield. What could Connie hope to bring to a rematch? What possible fight could she raise against such an overwhelmingly powerful enemy?

Her thoughts spiraled as the Centipeetles continued to nibble the CHAAAAPS that covered her.

Chapter Text

A warm summer sun wavered in reflection atop the waters of the Atlantic. White foam kissed the shore, and a cool ocean breeze whistled through against the high cliff of the Crystal Gems’ temple. Shadows darted across the sand as the seagulls overhead circled in search of their next meal. On the horizon, a gleaming white catamaran rode the wind and the waves, its vacationing passengers little more than dots to the observer at the shoreline.

Standing barefoot in the dark sand at the edge of the water, Connie scowled into the bright glare of the beautiful late morning sky. With a flex of her half-hollow, she flung all of the anger and heartache she’d gathered in the empty space inside of her out to sea. The air reacted to her mood by reversing that cool breeze into icy gales that pounded the surf. 

Over and over again, Connie summoned her mightiest winds, grunting and straining with the effort, sweat pouring down her face as she blasted apart the tide rolling across her feet. Waves parted, spraying in bright, shimmering gouts as she tore the sea apart into long channels that rolled inward to fill again just as quickly as they were created. Ten feet, then fifteen feet, then twenty, the length of the empty channels she carved continued to grow as she tried over and over again.

And it still wasn’t good enough. 

She’d ended her morning jog on the beach, not bothering to change out of her shorts and oversized Herculoids T-shirt, kicking off her shoes and socks to start a different kind of training immediately. As the sun continued to climb throughout the morning, she had pushed and pulled the air, pitting it against the tide over and over again, with diminishing results.

Tiring of wind blasts, Connie switched techniques. When she had been one half of a pair, she’d watched Jade create huge, arcing blades of wind that could cut down terrain and enemies alike. Connie tried to do the same, sweeping her hands forward like scythes, commanding the air to sharpen and focus to match her fury.

All she managed to produce were more wind blasts, these ones weaker than before because of how thinly she spread them to create an arc. The ocean splished feebly at her dull wind blades, unimpressed.

Growling, she tried to focus the air, tried to squeeze it into an edge as she threw it. All that accomplished was to create a long, spindly, sausage-like air grenade that popped above the surf, creating a brief rainbow through a long, thin spray of droplets. 

“Is that a rainbow blast? I like it!” Steven said from behind her.

Connie bit back an impatient sigh. Twice already, Steven had come down to the beach to see what she was doing, or just to say hello. By this third time, Connie’s well of false cheer had run dry. “Rainbows aren’t going to stop Pyrite,” she said, keeping her scowl toward the ocean.

“Well, rainbows are good for other things,” Steven insisted. “Powers don’t have to be all about fighting, right?”

She slashed at the air again in reply. Another long, wobbly wind blade drew a line in the surf thirty feet long before it fizzled. 

A long silence. His feet shuffled nervously in the sand. “I, uh, made us some lunch. It’s a recipe my dad and I made up: jurassitella wafflewiches!” he announced.

Slash! Splash! Another wind blade barely made it ten feet before the water overwhelmed it.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “How could two simple, humble musicians dream up something as amazing as putting dinosaur chicken nuggets and Nutella between two frozen waffles? It all began one cold winter’s eve in the back of a van…”

“I’m not hungry,” Connie said. 

Slash! Splash! Even shorter than before.

More shuffling. A long pause. Then, hesitantly, he said, “Yeah, but…you skipped breakfast, and…we kinda promised your parents to make sure you were eating.”

A cold shock spiked up through Connie’s guts, making her turn at last. She stared at his guilty expression, torn between feeling surprised or betrayed. “You’ve been spying on me for my parents?” she exclaimed.

Panicking, Steven waved his hands and said, “No, no, no, no! It’s not like that! They just texted Pearl a few times about stuff they were worried about, and Pearl told me—”

“What else did they say?” Connie demanded. She could just imagine the list of concerns her mother would pass to the Gems behind Connie’s back. Meal plans? A dress code? Study materials? 

“Nothing!” he insisted. “Nothing, I promise. I just…I remember what it was like for you, back when…back in the spring, when you couldn’t…”

When Jade had inadvertently starved Connie with a diet of ¡Soy Delicioso! But of course, Steven couldn’t dare say it in front of her. He could never mention Jade to Connie. Nobody could. Because she was so fragile. Because she might get upset. 

As if she hadn’t found plenty of other reasons to be upset after Jade had…

Whirling back to the ocean, Connie unleashed a pair of vicious wind blades. The air barely rippled the oncoming wave as it rolled up over her ankles. “I’m busy, Steven. I’ll eat later.”

A longer silence. She could feel him cringing behind her while she slashed at the air, churning the ocean with her anger. Finally, Steven said, “I know you’re upset about what happened yesterday—”

“Why would I be upset about that?” Connie snapped. Slash! Splish. “Is it because Pyrite beat me like I was nothing?” Slash! Splish. “Or is it because they all got away with everything they wanted, and we still have no idea where they went?” Slash! Splish.

“N-Not everything,” he said hurriedly. “Peridot said they left some of that plastanium stuff behind. And we took it with us back to the temple, remember? So maybe they don’t have enough to—”

“To what?” Slash! Splish. Connie gnashed her teeth and pushed her half-hollow harder. As fast as she could empty it, she had new frustrations and disappointments to pour into it. Jade’s stone wanted her to feel bad? She had fuel to spare. 

“I…I don’t…”

“None of us know!” Connie shot over her shoulder. “We don’t know where they are or what they’re doing!” Slash! Slash! Splish-Splosh.

In the silence that followed, her flash of anger began to cool. She didn’t dare look back and see the hurt she knew was twisting in his face.

Connie knew she wasn’t angry at Steven. He had done nothing but support her. At the heart of the matter, she wasn’t truly angry at Pyrite, either. She hated the gladiator Gem for taking Rose Quartz’s sword and for humiliating her at every turn. But they were enemies. Connie expected it.

She hadn’t expected that, after coming so far, and giving up so much, she would still be useless. That was a pain too big even for her half-hollow to hold. That wasn’t what Jade had sacrificed herself for.

“Connie,” Steven said gently, “you don’t have to push yourself like this. Please, stop trying to—”

The words galvanized Connie’s pain back into a rage. More than that, the mere idea of slowing down, of relenting for even one moment, pushed her heart up into her throat and set her body ablaze. 

She would beat Pyrite. She would save Jade’s world, like she’d promised. She would be a Jade.

Clenching her fists at her side, Connie closed her eyes and seethed, “I don’t. Want. To STOP.”

That last word exploded out of Connie like an air cannon, throwing her backwards onto the sand. The shockwave ripped through the tide and the sea bottom in a channel a hundred yards long, tossing the water aside into high, curling waves. Out at the horizon, the catamaran suddenly tilted, its sail tearing through its rigging. Distant shrieks of fright trickled back to the shore as the boat’s mast tilted back and forth like the arm of a metronome while the ship tried to right itself with its passengers clinging to their seats for dear life.

Connie stared as the sea crashed inward to fill in the trench her voice had carved. In one careless moment, she had summoned up more power than any intentional working of Jade’s gemstone she’d yet managed. If she had been inside the beach house with such a destructive voice, she and Steven would have been crushed under the collapsing walls of his own home.

But if she’d been standing in front of Pyrite… If she could reproduce such an effect…

Did Jade’s gemstone only want her to be angry now? Had it eaten its fill of sadness? 

Steven grasped at her shoulders, helping her numb body to its feet while her mind whirled with the possibilities. “Are you okay?” he said.

“Stop.” The word wasn’t directed at him, but it made him recoil as Connie whispered it to the ocean. She tried it again, louder. “Stop.” When the word failed to cut the ocean as it had before, she poured her fury and frustration into her half-hollow, igniting all of the sadness she’d kept locked inside into a white-hot fury. “STOP!” she screamed, thrusting her fists back and throwing her face at the ocean. “STOP!”

The screen door of the beach house creaked open, and Amethyst wandered onto the porch. “Hey, did you guys hear that a minute ago? It was like a crossing guard with ten megaphones at once,” she called down to Connie and Steven.

Snarling in frustration, Connie slashed at the waves again. Her puny wind blade barely ruffled the foam on the water. She grit her teeth and let her anger roil deep into her half-hollow, pushing it down as quickly as it grew.

With a lazy Gem jump, Amethyst leapt from the porch and arced gently down next to Steven. “What’s with her?” she asked Steven.

“She’s…training,” Steven said lamely.

The gentle reproach in his tone was impossible to miss. Connie kept her scowl locked to the horizon and the recovering catamaran as she unleashed a flurry of wind blades that came out as little more than puffs of air. “Steven,” she said, fighting to keep her annoyance out of her voice, “wants me to go inside and eat sandwiches.”

Amethyst sucked a breath through her teeth, which were stained with dark paste and fried breadcrumbs. “Ooh, were those for you guys?” she drawled.

His brows furrowed with deferred annoyance, and he turned back to Connie. “Look, I get it. WE get it,” he insisted, pointing to himself and Amethyst. “When Jasper came back, neither one of us could handle her on our own. We had to…fuse…”

Connie’s teeth gnashed as she heard him realize his mistake too late. “Well, I can’t FUSE!” she snarled, and hurled a wind blast through the surf with each shout. “I can’t make wind BLADES! I can barely make wind BLASTS! And if I don’t figure this out, Pyrite could— ulpp!”

Her gusting and shouting ended in a yelp as she felt herself lifted off the ground. Looking down, she saw a pair of purple hands at either side of her waist, holding her aloft. Amethyst hefted her as though she weighed nothing, and started back for the beach house. “Okay, that’s enough,” the stocky Gem said. “Let’s go.”

“Amethyst, put me down!” Connie squalled. She kicked her legs and pulled at Amethyst’s grip, to no avail. Amethyst carried her across the beach at a light jog and ran her up the steps of the porch.

“Wait! Where are you going?” Steven cried as he stumbled after them.

“I just decided that it’s my day with Connie,” Amethyst said offhandedly. “You can have her back when we’re done.” She shapeshifted a third arm out of her stomach, which opened the screen door for her to haul the wriggling Connie into the beach house.

Pearl looked up from the kitchen sink, where she scrubbed a pair of plates smudged with Nutella. Her brows rose at the sight of Connie’s amiable kidnapping. “What on Earth is happening here?” she asked reproachfully.

Before Connie could sputter a plea for help, Amethyst jostled her into silence, bounding across the floor and stomping down onto the warp pad. “Me and Connie are going on a field trip. Could you make us some more jurasitella wafflewiches for when we get back?” the purple Gem said.

Stars shone in Pearl’s eyes as she gasped. “What a wonderful idea! I like to organize the dinosaur nuggets on the waffle so they all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle,” she said. “You two have fun!”

“Wait, Pearl!” Connie protested, flailing and struggling. “Amethyst, where are we—”

A white tunnel erupted from the pad and whisked them out of the beach house. 

As the cool, crystal hum of warp space carried them to parts unknown, Connie sagged in Amethyst’s grasp, surrendering herself for the moment to whatever plans the Quartz had made. If Pearl thought the abduction benign enough to make sandwiches for their return, then Connie could trust Amethyst to bring her back relatively intact. Probably.

Seconds later, the warp tunnel deposited them onto a new pad, and Connie felt her nostrils cracking and her skin itching in the hot, dry air of the Kindergarten. She jerked reflexively at the sight of the high pockmarked cliff walls closing on either side of them, with only a tight sliver of gray sky cut from the rock straight overhead. The rush of blood in her ears grew deafening as the ambient noise of warp space vanished into the total deadness of the canyon’s emptiness.

“Why did you bring me here?” Connie asked.

“I gotta show you something,” Amethyst said. Still lugging Connie overhead, the stocky Gem jogged off the pad and began working her way through the length of the canyon.

Folding her arms, Connie grumped, “I can walk on my own, you know.”

Amethyst stopped, looking up through her curtain of white hair with a wry look. “On all these sharp rocks?”

Connie glanced down at the dusty, gritty ground, and then up at her wriggling bare toes.

“You want a piggyback ride instead?” Amethyst asked, waggling her eyebrows.

The already miserable expression on Connie’s face sank even deeper.

Five minutes later, they reached the far edge of the canyon. The walls around them both ended at the same point, and the world ahead opened up into a featureless desert. As Amethyst rounded the corner, Connie could see the end of the Kindergarten was as manufactured as the Gems it had produced: the cliffs broke in a perfectly flat wall that stretched perpendicularly from the pockmarked walls, looming high into the dark sky overhead. The clouds above the cliffs hung in a miasma that the wind refused to touch, leaving the desert in a perpetual gloom.

From her perch on Amethyst’s back, Connie could see blue sky beyond the edge of the gloom. The puffy clouds seemed to be steering around to avoid the Kindergarten. Even the winds knew to stay away. Connie had never felt utterly, completely still air since Jade’s powers had begun awakening inside of her, but the air around the canyon only stirred where she and Amethyst moved through it.

But Amethyst didn’t stop at the mouth of the Kindergarten. She took a hard left turn and followed the edge of the cliff. As they left the canyon behind, the cliff’s edge wound down, growing shorter, until it resembled little more than a hill with a single flat face. 

There, where the slope of the cliff barely ran a dozen feet high, Amethyst stopped and carefully let Connie down from her back. “Okay. We’re here,” Amethyst said.

“Where is…here?” Connie’s voice trailed off as she settled onto the ground. Her eyes were drawn to the rock face rising before them. Unlike the rest of the relatively flat cliffs, this portion curved inward in a long, broad divot almost two feet deep and nearly as tall as the top of the slope. 

“This,” said Amethyst, “is my wall.”

The ground beneath them was littered in little pebbles and chunks of rock, so Connie stepped carefully as she approached the long divot in the wall. Up close, she could see that the smoothness of the divot was actually a collection of lines that had been dragged through the stone itself. The tight, shallow channels crisscrossed over each other endlessly in a thatched pattern. Some spots looked old, like the untouched parts of the rock face closer to the Kindergarten, but others looked brighter, as though carved more recently.

Connie ran her fingers along one particularly long, fresh channel, where the rock was still bone white. It was perhaps as wide as her thumb, and half as deep. The rock in the channel felt glass-smooth to the touch. 

“What is this place?” Connie asked as her finger skittered through the jagged maze of lines.

“Step back, and I’ll show you,” Amethyst told her. 

As Connie picked her way carefully back to Amethyst’s side, the purple Quartz drew her studded whip from her gemstone. She gestured Connie behind her, and then lifted her weapon.

“You’re WEAK!” Amethyst bellowed, and lashed at the wall. Dust and rock sprayed out of the divot as a fresh, white wound appeared in the rock. “You’re too SMALL!” screamed Amethyst. She lashed again, and another gout of debris exploded from the rock face. “You’re not supposed to BE THIS WAY!” A flurry of lashes dug into the wall, which bled pebble and stone as Amethyst hurled her weapon across its open scar.

Connie watched from behind her hands, which shielded her from the rage of dust and grit ejecting out from under Amethyst’s onslaught. 

As Amethyst drew still, letting her whip trail listlessly on the ground, she turned to Connie with a grin. “See?” she said breathlessly. “Every time I feel bad about something, I come here, and I pound on this wall until I feel better. You wanna give it a try?”

Connie’s stomach plummeted as she looked upon the wall with new understanding. The newest gashes Amethyst had dug into the wall were less than an inch deep. And the divot at its deepest point extended more than an arm’s length into the rock face. “How long have you been doing this?” Connie asked, agape.

Amethyst’s smile fizzled into an uncomfortable expression. “Uh, I dunno. A while, I guess.”

The deep groove must have been the product of centuries of abuse. Maybe millennia. “Since you came out of the ground?” asked Connie.

Though she laughed aloud, Amethyst still shifted uncomfortably, unconsciously, as she waved off at the question. “Nah, I only started coming around to this spot after Rose found me. That’s when I found out I… Well, I didn’t really need it before that,” she said dismissively. 

“Amethyst…” Connie said, at a loss for words. 

Shaking her head, Amethyst insisted, “Hey, we’re not here for me. C’mon.” She guided Connie to stand centered against the divot in the wall, squaring her shoulders with a brusque grip. “Okay. Now, let loose. Go!”

Slowly, uncertainly, Connie bent her half-hollow toward the wall. “Take…this?” she said, and summoned a gust.

Dust plumed out the sides of the divot as rocks scattered from the base of the wall. A wave of blowback ruffled Amethyst’s long hair, and the Gem yawned. “That’s it?” she said. “Lame! C’mon, you’re supposed to get angry. The wall can take it!”

Straightening her spine, Connie threw her hands forward and bellowed, “Rargh!” The winds answered her call, blasting through the divot in a prolonged gust that snapped her hair straight backwards. A spray of little rocks tumbled over her bare feet as her blast cleared the ground of any debris within a dozen feet of the wall.

Amethyst nodded. “Better. But it doesn’t work unless you throw your mad at the wall, too. What are you mad about?”

“I…let Pyrite get away?” Connie said. Her next gust barely made the rubble around them jiggle.

“How come?” Amethyst challenged her.

Scowling, Connie gathered another blast. “I couldn’t beat her,” she growled, and flung another gust at the wall. More dust plumed from the fresh scars Amethyst had carved.

“How come? Dig deep,” Amethyst insisted.

“Because I didn’t train hard enough,” Connie said through her teeth. Wind howled around her, billowing into the deep groove of the wall, whistling as it danced through the grooves and hatches.

“Quit lying!” Amethyst shouted above the sound of the wind. “You’ve been working for that nonstop since she chucked you into the strawberries. What happened? Why couldn’t you?”

“Because I’m not good enough!” Connie screamed. 

She slashed an arm through the wind, and a belt of compressed air slammed lengthwise into the wall, making the whole rock face shudder. As the air went dead in the wake of the blast, a rain of pebbles cascaded down from the top of the slope and bounced onto the desert rock at the base of the wall.

“Yes!” Amethyst cheered as Connie leaned forward on her knees and huffed. “That’s what I’m talking about! Take all of that biz and throw it at the wall! Do it!”

Her tutelage under Pearl had taught Connie to keep her breathing slow and steady, a trick Pearl had learned secondhand from centuries of trading notes with human warriors who actually needed to breathe. But now, Connie’s breath came in ragged, untethered heaves as she opened her half-hollow and let it spill into the air around her. The hair lifted from her shoulders as she narrowed her eyes at the wall.

“I’m not GOOD enough!” Connie screamed, and slashed her hand at the wall. Another belt of air slammed into the divot and billowed back at them. “I’m not STRONG enough! I’m not supposed to BE like this!” Two more blasts hammered the stone, raining fresh debris across the ground.

“Yeah! Tell it to the wall, sister!” Amethyst cried.

“I’M A MISTAKE!” Connie roared. Crossing her arms, she swept both out at once.

Two distinct bands of air leapt to her call and collided into the divot at exactly the same moment. An explosion rocked the air, blasting Connie off her feet amidst a terrific clap of thunder. The whole wall shook as a crack formed inside the groove and leapt outward in either direction. A lengthwise fissure opened in the wall like a flat, ugly, crooked smile carved straight through the heart of the divot Amethyst had spent centuries digging.

Connie stared in horror at the damage she’d wrought while she pushed herself back onto shaky legs. “A-Amethyst, I…I’m sor—”

But Amethyst cut her off with a tremendous whoop and lifted Connie into a swooping hug. “Woo! That was awesome!” Amethyst laughed as she spun Connie around.

When Amethyst put her down again, Connie staggered, slightly dizzy and quite confused. “I…wow,” she breathed.

“How do you feel?” Amethyst asked, laying a steadying hand on Connie’s shoulder.

Connie peered into her half-hollow. The things she’d said, and the feelings behind them, were still lurking inside. But they didn’t feel as overwhelming as they had when she’d been fuming wordlessly against the ocean. “Lighter,” she decided aloud.

“Now, whenever you’ve got those feelings jumbled up inside of you, you can come here and put ‘em in the wall,” Amethyst told her, nodding. “You can come here anytime you want. Mi pared es tu pared. ”

Smiling weakly, Connie nodded in kind and said, “Thanks, Amethyst.”

But Amethyst’s hand lingered, and squeezed Connie’s shoulder gently. “This is important,” she insisted, fixing Connie with an uncharacteristically serious stare. “Those feelings? You have to throw them at the wall. They have to go here. Not on patrol. Not in a fight. And definitely not at the house.”

A wave of shame rippled up through Connie as she remembered how snappish she had been with Steven. Her eyes dropped to her bare feet as she mumbled, “Right. Sorry.”

Shaking her head, Amethyst said, “It’s okay. Garnet and Pearl are exactly who they want to be. Strong. Perfect. And Steven…” Amethyst bit her lip, hesitating, and then said, “Even if we don’t completely understand why Rose did it, and even if he never believes it, I think Steven is exactly who Rose wanted him to be. But you and me…”

Connie’s heavy gaze lifted to the cracked divot in the wall. “We’re not supposed to be like this?” she said.

Pressing her mouth flat, Amethyst nodded. “It’s not true, and we both know it. But…it’s okay to feel like that sometimes anyway. And it feels good to make it the wall’s problem for a little while.”

She leapt suddenly, whirling into a white blur that slammed into the wall. She spin-dashed the length of the crack, polishing her divot smooth as she kicked a wave of dust and grit behind her. Then she bounced off the wall and landed lightly next to Connie.

Sighing with contentment, Amethyst asked, “So, are you ready to head back?”

Guiltily, Connie said, “Would it be okay if I…”

Amethyst lifted her hands and backed away. “Take all the time you need,” she told Connie. With a wicked grin, she added, “But if you take too long, you might miss out on jurasitella wafflewiches!”

Connie’s stomach lurched at the thought of cold-in-the-middle microwaved chicken nuggets pasted between two frozen waffles. “Are they seriously that good?” she asked.

Checking in either direction first, Amethyst leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “I would never tell her so, but Pearl makes the best jurasitella wafflewiches. She crisps the waffles, adds the perfect amount of Nutella, and when you bite into it, each dinosaur gets its own moment. It’s annoying how good hers are.”

Laughing, Connie said, “Be sure to save me one, then.”

“Maybe I will,” Amethyst called as she backed away. “Maybe I won’t. See ya!”

Connie held her smile for as long as it took Amethyst to spin-dash back through the mouth of the Kindergarten. A few seconds later, she saw a warp tunnel flash up through the gray gloom overhead. Only then did she let her aching cheeks drop.

Turning back to the wall, Connie opened her half-hollow again. Only this time, instead of wild blasts, she focused the dark feelings pouring out into parallel bands of rippling air pressure. She bent her will toward shaping the air as precisely as she could, imaging the path her pressure differentials would take.

A blade wasn’t simply a flat thing that bludgeoned its intended target. Blades converged from two directions into a honed edge. If she could do the same with the wind…

Feeling experimental, human? the voice inside of her said. How nice. I tried an experiment once: I trusted exactly one human to keep her promises and let me live.

The roiling ball in Connie’s stomach turned a sickly, ugly black color as she tried stuffing it deep into her half-hollow. She scowled at the long, jagged crack in the wall, and began to build two conjoined constructs in her mind, stretching and pulling at the wind to fill them with pressure.

Remember how that turned out?

Connie clenched her eyes shut, trying to focus on the complex shape forming in her mind. The ugly, roiling ball grew bigger with every word the voice inside of her spoke, pushing up and out of her half-hollow no matter how hard she pressed down on it. 

You aren’t good enough, the voice assured her. You aren’t strong enough. And you already knew that. Because you’re not supposed to be like this.

Eddies stirred in the dead air, pushing Connie’s thick hair into a writhing black halo that framed her scowling face. The constructs she had built strained to hold the waves of pressure she pushed into them as she glared at the wall.

You don’t get to be weak anymore. After everything you took from me, you don’t get to be just a human. Start being more.

Connie snarled and lashed out with her hand, curling two fingers to hook onto the constructs in the air and throw them forward. The rippling pressure waves shot forward and collided, both trying to pour into the long crack in the wall at the same time. Their clash hardened the air into a knife’s edge that broke the rock wider with a thunderclap of noise. Each end of the crack shot through the rock face in opposite directions, growing beyond the pockmarked scars that Amethyst had carved into it over the centuries.

Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a smile that made her cheeks ache. She formed the constructs again, filled them, and threw them, all of it faster than before. Another blade of air slammed lengthwise into the wall. The crack grew even wider as dust plumed out of the jagged scar in the rock.

Again, and again, Connie threw wind blades at the wall as quickly as she could create them, forcing herself to make them bigger and stronger, making new blades faster than she could throw them. As quickly as she could empty it, her half-hollow became full again, gorging itself on that roiling black ball of anger she could no longer fit inside of it.

Amethyst’s words were true. The ugly rage swirling inside of Connie had no place on the battlefield or at home. Neither her enemies, nor Steven, deserved it. And she couldn’t afford to waste it on the wall, no matter how good Amethyst’s intentions had been.

That anger belonged to Connie. She needed it. She deserved it.

So she kept silent, kept the words turned inward, as she unleashed a hurricane of wind blades that tore apart the face of the wall.

Chapter Text

Connie came home from her morning jog to find an ambush waiting for her. 

As she pushed through the screen door, her suspicions rose at the sounds of whispering voices suddenly going silent. She found Pearl and Steven huddled at the island counter in the midst of a conspiracy. The pair drew apart from their murmurings to offer her two huge smiles as she came into the house.

“Good morning, Connie!” Pearl sang. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”

Easing the door closed behind her, Connie slunk into the house. “Yes?” she said warily.

“It’s the kind of day that makes you want to hit the town!” Steven agreed, cocking his fist with stiff enthusiasm. “Really get out there and make the most of the day!”

Her nebulous suspicions coalesced into hardened recognition. Connie frowned, and shoved the feeling deep into her overstuffed half-hollow. “Yep,” she agreed, fighting to smooth out her tone. “That’s why I’m gonna head to the Kindergarten for some wind training. All of the openings in the walls makes for some tricky air manipulation. Give me an extra challenge.”

Steven’s and Pearl’s faces twitched with barely hidden disappointment. 

Before walking in the door, Connie hadn’t thought to train in the Kindergarten that day. She also didn’t know if the Gem holes in the Kindergarten’s walls made Jade’s gemstone work harder to manipulate air pressure or form wind constructs. But it sounded plausible out loud. And if Steven and Pearl were going to try to trick her into abandoning her training with some half-baked stage play, then she wouldn’t feel bad about spinning falsehoods of her own. She’d lied to her own parents for over a year about training to fight. What was one more lie to her mentor and her best friend?

More guilt. More anger. More fuel for her half-hollow. And she would have easy access to Amethyst’s wall if those feelings got to be too much for the hollow to contain.

Plus, she wouldn’t need to shower or change out of her running shorts and hand-me-down Mötley Crōe T-shirt, another oversized garment she’d pilfered from her father’s wardrobe.

As she brushed past the kitchen to head for the warp pad, while the two co-conspirators stammered for some reply, the warp pad chimed, and a column of white light descended through the ceiling. 

Lapis took shape from the light as it vanished into the pad beneath her. The slender blue Gem stepped down from the pad, looking at her surroundings with an expression of mild discomfort. But that expression melted into delight as she said, “Hey, Steven! Hey, Connie!”

Steven’s stilted voice came back as he marched to Lapis’s side and threw an arm around her waist. “Why, it’s Lapis! What a surprise!”

“What are you talking about?” Lapis said, frowning. “You said to—”

“What’s that?” Steven asked loudly. “You’re looking for a change of pace, and want to see what Beach City has to offer? Why, we’re just the Gems to show you around!”

Clapping, Pearl announced, “Yes, that’s a lovely idea, Steven! We should all take Lapis on a day-long tour of the town to show her everything, and just forget any other plans we might have had for the day!”

Lapis looked between Steven’s and Pearl’s rictus grins with confusion. “Wait. I thought you said we were doing this for Connie. Did that change? Because I don’t want to see Beach City.”

Connie stared flatly at Steven, who had begun to sweat profusely through his own too-wide smile. 

She appreciated his concern. Truly, deeply, she did. But Connie had been coddled by overprotective parents before. She didn’t need that same coddling from her best friend. Not when the fate of the world was on the line. 

As she tried to think of a diplomatic way to explain to Steven, Pearl, and the haplessly conscripted Lapis that she wanted no part of their schemes, Steven’s phone interrupted with a tinny, peppy chiptune song. She wondered if this was another component of his and Pearl’s skit. But when he gasped and clutched at his cheeks, pressing his vibrating phone to his face, her doubt came back.

“Ohmygosh, it’s Lars! Lars is calling me! Lars never calls me!” Steven cried, jumping from foot to foot. “Maybe he heard about our best friend outing and wanted in! Okay, okay, okay! Calm down, everyone!” he shouted at the silent room. Steadying himself with a breath, he stared solemnly at the phone buzzing in his hand. “You have one shot at this, Steven. It has to be perfect.”

His thumb tapped the phone’s screen, and the chiptune cover of Everything Is Awesome fell silent. Steven lifted the phone to his face.

“Hidey-hey-hodey-ho-ho-hello, Lars, my main man!” Steven cheered into the phone. Then he covered the microphone to grin at the collective, bewildered stares of his audience as he mouthed the words, Nailed it!

An angry voice erupted in Steven’s ear. As Steven fumbled to get a word in edgewise, Lapis looked to Pearl in confusion. “Who or what is a Lars?” Lapis asked.

Pearl rolled her eyes, and said, “He’s a very unpleasant doughnut human who works up the hill.”

Jolting upright, Lapis looked at Connie and said, “Humans can be made of doughnuts too? You really are what you eat? I thought Peridot said that was a myth!”

Before Connie could begin unpacking that tangled web of aphorisms, Steven broke through the stream of angry yelling coming through his phone. “Lars, slow down! What do you mean, one of my ‘moms’ is at the Big Donut? Do you mean the Gems?”

Pearl frowned quizzically. “He couldn’t mean Amethyst. She and Garnet left for a patrol earlier this morning.”

Shrugging, Lapis added, “Peridot is back on the farm working on some project.”

Wincing, Steven jerked the phone away from his ear. “He says that my ‘big, white mom’ is scaring away all of the customers.”

For a moment, everyone looked to Pearl, who seemed offended at the mere suggestion. “Well, I’m right here, aren’t I? And I would never loiter at that establishment if I weren’t buying doughnuts for Steven! So who—”

The realization struck them all at the same time.

As she crested the hill with the other Gems, Connie saw the problem lurking in the Big Donut’s front lot. Her half-hollow flexed, pulling the breeze in around her to ready an arsenal of wind blades and air grenades. Her lips curled in a silent snarl, and her ears popped as the pressure rose at her command.

Crouched behind one of the establishment’s communal outdoor tables, Milky Quartz peered out from around the edge of the tabletop to watch the Crystal Gems—and a cautiously curious Lapis—advancing on her hiding spot. The massive Gem stood out like a white beacon, with her wild mane of hair poking up above the summer parasols fitted into the Big Donut’s outdoor tables. She watched Connie and the others running up the hill with intense scrutiny.

As her enemies drew nearer, Milky cried out in alarm, and her enormous right hand reached up and plucked the parasol from the middle of the table. She lowered the parasol to block herself from view, even though the circular shade was too small to eclipse all of her bulk at once.

For a moment, Connie felt a silent question hold her and the others at the edge of the lot. Would Milky attack? Was she a scout for a larger ambush on the way? Connie’s hand hung poised at her chest, ready to draw a sailcloth sword from Jade’s gemstone with a bad thought.

But as the seconds ticked by without an ensuing fight, she felt herself ease back, not quite relaxing, but no longer poised to attack. “Is she…hiding?” Connie asked the others.

Steven and Pearl offered helpless shrugs, as visibly confused as Connie felt. Lapis took a tentative step forward and cupped her hands to her mouth. “Hey! We can see you!” she called to Milky.

From behind her parasol, Milky called back, “No, you can’t! You can see this cloth thing, not me standing behind it!”

“Strictly speaking, that’s true,” Pearl called in agreement. “But we know you’re over there!”

A long moment passed in tense silence before Milky, still half-hidden, called back, “Okay.”

An insistent tapping drew their attention away from the highly conspicuous Quartz to the glass doors of the Big Donut, where Lars and Sadie watched the encounter. Lars glared at Steven from the other side of the door, and knocked loudly until Steven finally approached. Connie chased after Steven to put herself between him and Milky, and stifled some harsh words for his carelessness while one of their sworn enemies crouched less than ten feet away.

“Steven!” Lars hissed through the glass. “Tell your creepy aunt or whatever to go away! We haven’t had a customer all morning!”

Sadie fiddled nervously at Lars’s side. “Not that we minded the slow morning,” she added, “but if we don’t get a single sale on a day during the busy season, that’s pretty much the end of our doughnut careers.”

“But what has she been doing here?” insisted Steven.

“Who cares?” Lars cried, throwing up his hands. “Go make your creepy lion eat her, or something!”

Sadie pushed forward with an impatient glare at Lars, and then answered, “She’s been here all morning. I think she was watching your part of the beach, Steven.”

So. A scouting mission after all. With a dark thought, Connie drew her sword from Jade’s stone, and announced, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of her.”

Seeing Connie’s weapon emerge, Pearl drew her spear from her own stone, whirling it into a ready stance. Behind her, Lapis flicked her wings out and looked ready to dart into the sky to escape the oncoming melee.

Milky staggered to one side, wielding the parasol like a giant colorful shield featuring a cartoon doughnut. “No, no!” the hulking Quartz insisted. “You got it all wrong! I’m not Milky Quartz! I’m…uh…Not-Milky Quartz! Just an ordinary earthling doing ordinary earth things!”

Connie saw Pearl moving to flank their large opponent, and readied herself to follow her mentor’s lead. They had practiced any number of coordinated maneuvers against bigger, stronger opponents, until the motions felt like second nature. As huge as she was, Milky wouldn’t last six seconds against the student and master working together.

“Okay!” Steven cried, leaping in front of Connie’s sword. “We believe you!”

Cocking her head in disbelief, Milky said, “You do?”

Connie shot a much more intense look of disbelief at the back of Steven’s head. “No, we don’t!” she snapped. She turned to Pearl for support, but the slender, pale Gem looked just as confused and conflicted as Milky did.

Steven kept his eyes locked with Milky’s as he approached her slowly. With a gentle gesture, he pushed aside the giant parasol and said, “Sure we do. You’re obviously not Milky Quartz. See? Milky has a giant arm, and, uh…your arm is regular-sized!” He patted Milky’s left arm, which was still massive compared to either Steven’s or Connie’s, but was miniscule compared to Milky’s tremendous right arm. “Also, Milky has a hammer fist, and your fist is just a fist-fist! Plus, I wouldn’t call your complexion ‘milky.’ You’re more of an eggshell white, don’t you think?”

“Um…yeah!” Milky said, nodding vigorously.

“Steven!” Connie hissed through her teeth.

He offered his hand to Milky, beaming, and said, “Pleased to meet you, Not-Milky Quartz. My name is Steven!”

Milky stared at his hand in confusion, and then brightened with some kind of understanding. Using her enormous right hand, she grasped Steven’s whole body and shook him firmly twice, then set him back down. He staggered for a moment before his equilibrium caught up to the rest of him.

“Firm handshake you’ve got there,” Steven said. “Say, Not-Milky, you’re new around here. Right?”

Nodding, Milky said, “Yeah. I wasn’t here last time when Flint and Pyrite attacked you Crystal Gems. I mean, they attacked our human enemies!” she hurried to correct herself. “Because we’re humans too! Me and all my human friends!”

Connie felt like she had gone insane as she watched Pearl reluctantly dismiss her spear and approach the pair. “Excuse me, um, ‘Not-Milky,’” Pearl interjected, “would you mind if Steven and the rest of us discussed something in private for a moment?”

“Sure! I’ll just be over here doing…human things…” Milky said. She lifted the parasol above her, shading herself from the blazing summer sun.

At Pearl’s gesturing, Steven and Connie joined her in a huddle close by the lurking Quartz. Even Lapis, loathe as she was to go anywhere near Milky Quartz, came into their circle to join in the whispering. “Steven, what are you doing?” Pearl hissed. “Milky is dangerous, even by herself!” Her eyes never strayed far from where their enemy loitered under her parasol, watching them intently.

“She didn’t come here to fight,” Steven whispered. “She was just spying on us.”

With mild surprise, Connie found herself agreeing with Lars’s assessment of their would-be spy. “Who cares?” she insisted, struggling to keep her voice low. “Let’s bubble her. Then her friends don’t get any intel on us, and we have one less person to fight the next time we see them!”

Steven’s expression wavered only a moment before he set his jaw resolutely, and whispered, “If we talk to her, maybe we can learn more about what Shard’s up to. And…”

Connie could hear the rest of his oh-so-Steven-y sentiment as he trailed off. And maybe, if she gets to know us, we can all be friends. Because of course Steven would want to see the best in someone who’d tried to kill him just two days earlier.

“I can’t believe I tricked them!” Milky murmured to herself, failing to stifle a laugh behind her smaller hand. “They’re so dumb!”

“Steven, this is dangerous and foolish,” Pearl whispered. But even she seemed to be teetering on the edge of giving in to his gambit.

“Guys,” Steven pleaded, “please trust me.”

Lapis piped up, murmuring, “I trust you, Steven. If you think this is for the best, then let’s do it.”

With that, Pearl tipped into agreement, and nodded wearily. Connie, seeing the votes turn against her, bit her tongue.

“But also,” Lapis added before they could pull apart, “if she tries anything, I’m hitting her with the ocean.”

Connie didn’t want to think about exactly how much of the ocean the blue Gem meant in her threat. She had seen Lapis lift every ocean on the planet all at once, and was in no hurry for an encore.

As their circle broke, Steven flashed his trademark grin at Milky, and said, “Hey, Not-Milky! Since you’re new in town, would you like us to show you around?”

“Like, inside your temple? Where you keep all your secrets?” Milky said excitedly.

Connie knew that Steven could feel her glare on the back of his head, because he rubbed at that exact spot as he said, “Well…maybe let’s start with a tour of the town instead?”

“Hmm… Can I bring this thing?” Milky asked, and hefted the parasol.

Steven answered, “Yes,” at exactly the same moment Lars and Sadie yelled through the glass, “NO!”

Disappointedly sans parasol, Milky followed Steven up the boardwalk, hanging on his every breathless word while he narrated their walk. “And down there is the Fry place, and next to it is Fish Stew Pizza. Oh! But here, we have the T-shirt store!” Steven said, stopping Milky outside of the marquee window.

The big Quartz hunched down, squinting to make out the screen-printed wisdom displayed on a row of mannequins who possessed questionable tastes in attire. “Undertow Is A Real Drag,” Milky read aloud. “So, humans say weird things to each other with their clothes?”

Steven started to shake his head, but then stopped, and thought about it some more. “Actually, yeah. Kinda,” he admitted.

“Humans change their clothes a lot. I like just looking like this,” Milky said, and patted her gray tunic. Then, twitching, she added, “Uh, I mean, I change my clothes as often as other humans do! All my clothes just look like this!”

“Hey, same!” Steven said brightly, and tugged at his pink shirt. 

As she followed a few paces behind, Connie remained at the precipice of attack, holding herself at that edge with a clenched jaw and a racing heartbeat. The adrenaline of a battle deferred still buzzed in her veins, and hearing Steven’s easygoing laughter as he and Milky traded fashion insights did little to ease her back from that edge.

“Connie.” Pearl murmured her name too low for the pair ahead of them to overhear, but her tone of warning rang clearly in Connie’s ear. The graceful Gem rested a hand on Connie’s shoulder and offered her a wan smile. “It’ll be okay. Stay calm.”

“What makes you think I’m not calm?” Connie murmured back shortly.

Pearl’s hand lingered on her shoulder, tapping a slender finger pointedly on Connie’s arm. Looking down, Connie saw her sailcloth sword still clenched in whitened knuckles at her side. The tip remained lowered toward the boardwalk, but still at the ready. At the realization, Connie also noticed that the tourists on the boardwalk had quickly and quietly found somewhere else to be, far away from the teenager carrying an unsheathed green blade. Though, in fairness, Connie thought that they might also be shy because of the nine-foot-tall alien with an arm like a tree trunk walking ahead of her.

Stuffing a retort into her half-hollow, Connie compromised, and flipped the hilt into a defensive grip that folded the blade back along her arm. She held a deeply rooted respect for all of her teachers, and none more so than Pearl. But her every experience with Milky Quartz leading up to that moment had been a fight for her life. The hulking Gem warrior had threatened her parents during their trip to the Kindergarten, and had tracked Connie inside her school. Connie’s classmates had nearly become collateral damage because Milky had been hunting her. Was Connie supposed to just forget about that, or all of the other times Shard’s giant underling had threatened them?

“You and I are here to keep Milky in line,” Pearl said, as though reading Connie’s thoughts. “But Steven has made connections with creatures far angrier and more dangerous than that behemoth.”

“Right here,” Lapis agreed, raising her hand in acknowledgment. “And it was personal for me. For Milky, I think it’s just her being a Gem soldier, marching to somebody else’s orders. Steven’s really good at making you break out of your old way of thinking and seeing Earth from a new perspective.”

A wistful smile broke Pearl’s serious expression. “He gets that from his mother,” she said.

Connie felt herself slipping away from Lapis and Pearl as she saw a group of familiar faces standing in the courtyard past the Fry Shack. Evidently these three teenagers were inured enough to bejeweled shenanigans— bejewligans, Connie reminded herself—that they didn’t feel a need to run in terror. 

Darting forward, Connie pulled up along Milky’s other side, gripping her sword tightly as Steven waved to the trio. “Hey, guys!” he called.

Jenny Pizza looked up from the loose circle she shared with Sour Cream and a third teenager Connie hadn’t met before. The older girl wore canvas shorts and a rainbow tank top, and her sneakers tapped on the concrete as she worked with the other two to keep a hacky sack in the air between them. “Hey yourself, Steven! Hey, Connie!” Jenny said, grinning. 

“Connie,” Steven said, “You’ve met Jenny and Sour Cream…”

The pallid DJ’s oversized khakis flapped as he kicked the hacky sack to the third teen in the circle. “Yo! How’d those headphones work out for your friend?” he asked.

Connie’s hand trembled around the hilt of her sword. “...she loved them,” Connie said flatly.

“Ha!” Steven laughed nervously. “And this, of course, is Buck!”

The third teen was a tall boy with sharply quaffed hair and a pair of inscrutable sunglasses, and he wore his designer label shirts in a carefully untucked manner. “I like your sword,” Buck said to Connie as he passed the hacky sack to Jenny with a lazy kick.

As Connie fought down a blush, not fully understanding why her cheeks felt hot in the first place, Steven continued his introductions. “And you guys know Pearl. These are my other friends, Lapis and Not-Milky!”

Buck and Sour Cream stared up in wonder at Milky’s sheer size as the Quartz stepped forward, forcing Jenny into a solo game lest their sack go un-hacky’d. “Whoa. Giant woman,” Buck said.

“Not-Milky, huh?” Sour Cream drawled, looking the huge Quartz up and down. “Is it cool if we call you ‘Milky’ for short?”

“Sure! I am a Milky Quartz, after all!” Milky said cheerfully, and waved with her immense hand. “Do you have any secrets I should know about?”

“Sometimes I wonder if anybody really likes me for me,” Buck said, his effortless monotone never wavering.

“Aw, we like you, Buck!” Jenny insisted. She kicked a high pass to him.

Buck cradled the hacky sack with a series of low, easy kicks. “Wow. I feel way better now. Thanks,” he said, his monotone still seemingly earnest.

Sour Cream took the hacky sack next, juggling it on his heels behind his back. “You guys wanna get in on this hack?” he asked Steven.

“Hack yeah!” Steven cheered. As the colorful little bean bag sailed his way, he backed up and caught it with his foot, bouncing it a few times to gauge its size and weight. Then he grew bolder, kicking the bag off his heel, ducking his shoulder under a high arc and catching it on his knee, then tossing it up to his elbow. “Milky, give it a try!” he said, and bopped the sack toward Milky.

Eyes widening, Milky Quartz lifted her immense hand into a fist, pulling it back in a readying stance. The motion made Connie tense her arm and bring the razor’s edge of her sword to bear.

Milky’s fist shot forward, and she caught the hacky sack between her grapefruit-sized knuckles. With a flex, her knuckles squeezed the sack, which shot up into the air. Flipping her hand, Milky used her enormous fingers to tap the hacky sack into high arcs, keeping her palm steady as the bag bounced from fingertip to fingertip.

“Hey, not bad!” Jenny said, watching Milky juggle the hacky sack with just her fingers. 

Laughing, Milky sent the hacky sack between her fingers in a string of quick little bounces. “This is just like the dexterity exercises they made us do back in the Kindergarten!” she exclaimed.

“Your kindergarten sounds intense,” Buck said. “Mine was mostly about learning to count and sorting shapes and colors.”

Lapis frowned, and said, “I’ve never heard of Kindergarteners making anyone do exercises.”

Milky shrugged without moving her arm. “They told us it was because all the Milky Quartzes came out wrong, and they wanted to see if we could still function. Otherwise they would recycle us.”

“That’s heavy,” Sour Cream grunted. “My mom said I came out backwards.”

“I came out with a bunch of spare parts,” Jenny chimed in. “They put ‘em together and named her ‘Kiki.’”

Milky’s smile gradually faded as she kept the hacky sack moving with her fingers. “This is great, but I was hoping to see some of your devices or machines,” she admitted to Steven.

Steven pondered her words, and his eyes trailed further down the boardwalk. Then he grinned, and said, “I know a place that has the best machines and devices on Earth!”

“You do?” Milky whirled on him in excitement. The motion slapped the hacky sack out of the air, shooting it straight into Buck’s chest like a tiny cannonball. Buck wheezed as he flew backwards and collapsed onto the pavement in a sprawl of limbs.

Taken aback by Milky’s intensity, Steven hesitated back a step. His eyes flicked to the twitching body on the ground as he said, “Um, yeah. But first, let me make sure Buck isn’t dead…”

“Okay!” Milky said, and waited patiently as Steven scrambled to Buck, already licking his palm.

Connie seethed and said nothing. Even still, she didn’t miss the guilty look Steven shot her, or his deepening uncertainty as they both glanced at the cheerfully oblivious Milky.

Chapter Text

The ambulance rolled into motion with its lights and siren blaring a path through the scattering onlookers. Jenny and Sour Cream rode in the back, accompanying Buck on his trip to the hospital, while the curious tourists and denizens of Beach City disbursed, returning from the public medical dramatics to get on with their day.

Lapis grinned at the fading siren of the ambulance. “That was cool! Why don’t all cars come with lights and noisemakers like that?” she said.

“Right? Way more fun that way” Milky agreed.

Pearl rested a hand on Steven’s shoulder, comforting him as he watched the ambulance disappear around the corner. “It’ll be fine,” she reassured him. “They said his heart probably only stopped for a few seconds. Why, that’s hardly any time at all.”

Connie fumed, grinding her fingertips against the hilt of her sword. Even though Buck had regained consciousness before the ambulance had arrived, she still couldn’t forgive Milky for offhandedly hospitalizing someone. She listened to the callous oaf laughing with Lapis, and had to hold herself back from attacking then and there.

“Okay,” Steven said, steadying himself, “where were we? Right, you wanted to see our machines! Follow me!” And he skipped forward, encouraging Milky to follow him down the boardwalk. Lapis and Pearl followed, trailed by Connie, who stuffed her anger into her half-hollow to keep silent.

They didn’t have to go far before Steven turned and, with a natural showman’s flair, presented the blinking lights and overlapping, overwhelming whizbang sounds of the Funland Arcade. The cozily dark lighting inside highlighted a wash of different colors beaming from out of dozens of flashing screens, and hid a world of different stains in the grimy carpet. In the back, a bored teenager on his phone leaned over a glass counter featuring the arcade’s prizes, with the wall behind the teen displaying the largest and most valuable of the prizes waiting to be won.

“Welcome,” he said, “to the Funland Arcade, home to Earth’s finest devices!”

“Oh, dear,” Pearl murmured, hesitating at the threshold of Beach City’s palace of distractables. As she watched, Milky stooped under the marquee and drifted into the arcade, wholly enchanted by the lights and sounds. “Steven, are you sure about this?”

“How’s this for sure?” Steven dug into his pocket and pulled out a crisp five dollar bill, which he held by the edges and snapped dramatically.

Lapis squinted at the bill, and said, “I don’t know. How sure is a green picture of some human?”

He scurried to the change machine at the front of the arcade and fed his bill into it. The machine obediently spit out a small rush of quarters, which he scooped out of the metal bowl and presented to the rest of them. “He’s twenty quarters sure!”

“Wow!” said Lapis, sounding impressed as she poked at the quarters. “All these metal pictures look way more sure than the paper picture did!”

Armed with Steven’s fortune of quarters, they followed after Milky. The hulking Quartz wasn’t hard to find, easily towering over any of the games and cabinets packed into the arcade. She’d stopped in front of a short, wide cabinet decorated with a cartoon featuring alarmed gangsters in pinstripe business suits running from a policeman carrying a comically large mallet. The game’s name, Whacker Man, loomed above the popup gangsters.

Milky watched the game’s enticing self-advertisement, as its whack-a-mole-like plastic gangsters popped in and out of holes in the base of the game. “Ehh, you gonna wack me?” the digital voice of a gangster taunted them while the plastic gangsters danced on the board.

“What’s this one do?” Milky said, watching the gangsters dance up and down with piston-like grace, practically begging for someone to bop them. 

“Eyyy, you’ll never wack me!” the gangster's voice taunted them.

Steven looked at Wacker Man, and then at Milky’s wide eyes glittering with wonderment, and then Milky’s enormous fist resting on the soda-stained carpet. “Okay,” he said slowly. “I feel like we can all guess where this is going. Why don’t we go find a different game?”

“Awww,” Milky whined, but didn’t struggle as Steven took her smaller hand and led her deeper into the arcade.

They ended up instead at a row of skee ball machines. He prodded each of them to stand in front of their own machine, and then fed a quarter into each one. Connie watched a row of skee balls ka-chung down into a slot by her feet, clacking together as they came to rest.

Steven stood at Milky’s machine and took one of the balls from its slot. “See? Like this,” he said, and rolled the ball up the machine’s lane.

His toss bounced off the hundred-point basket and dropped into the broader twenty-point basket at the bottom. Milky clapped and cheered as the machine lit up, flashing the points on its digital scoreboard. “Ooh! The number went up!” she cried.

“The idea is to get the ball into the holes with the higher number,” he explained to the Gems. “The higher your number, the better you do!”

“Like this?” Lapis took one of her skee balls and flipped it overhand at her machine. The ball klonked loudly against the metal backing and dropped into the ten-point basket at the very bottom of the machine. A shallow dent remained where her ball had struck the backboard.

Wincing at the noise of Lapis’s toss, Connie said, “Maybe try rolling it instead…”

Pearl hefted a ball, testing its weight. Then, with a flick of her wrist, she rolled the ball up the lane and sank it into her machine’s hundred-point basket. “It seems simple enough,” she agreed, and promptly sank a second ball for another hundred points.

With Steven’s encouragement, Milky took one of the skee balls, struggling to get even her smaller hand’s thick fingers into the slot to draw out a single ball. She watched Pearl sink a third perfect shot, and then frowned at her own machine, considering the scoreboard at the far end of her lane.

Then Milky transferred the ball into her massive right hand. Without stretching or stepping forward, she reached out and stuffed the skee ball into the hundred-point basket, her huge arm easily crossing the full length of the lane of her machine.

“I did it!” Milky exclaimed. Hurriedly, she struggled to dig out a second ball, eager to try again.

“You’re really good at this!” Steven said as he watched her stuff another ball into the machine. “Do you play lots of games like this back at, erm, wherever you’re from?”

“Naw,” said Milky. “Mostly I just move stuff around and get yelled at.”

“That’s no fun,” Steven said sympathetically. “What are they yelling about?”

Milky’s mouth went flat, making her craggy stalactite beard wriggle unhappily. “Oh, they’re always angry about something. Pyrite yells at me because I’m in the way. Polarite yells at me because she thinks I’ll break her stuff. Zircon yells at me for breaking Polarite’s stuff. And Flint…I guess she just yells about everything,” 

He patted her arm, and said, “Those sound like some loud human friends you have.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah! Human friends,” Milky agreed quickly.

“Do you…like being with your friends?” Steven asked carefully.

Milky paused with another skee ball pinched between her enormous fingers. She frowned, shifting uncomfortably. “Yeah, I guess,” she said. “I mean, not most of them. But Flint’s my best friend. We’ve been together ever since we got sent to Colony One after the war.”

“Well…could we be friends, Milky?” Steven asked.

The question seemed to pull Milky out of her momentary funk. “Yeah!” she said, brightening. “Okay!”

Connie watched Steven and Milky from the end of the skee ball row, staring as Milky began telling him some inane story about how she and Flint had stolen and hidden Polarite’s tools after the pompous Gem had berated them for not being more useful while she’d disassembled the reactor plating of the colony ship. As she talked, Milky plucked another ball from the slot, pinching it between her enormous fingers.

Suddenly, Connie was back in her school, back when Milky had tracked her there using her power to dowse for other Gems. Dangling above the floor in Milky’s inescapable grasp, Connie felt the air leave her body in one final squeak as her ribs creaked and her lungs burned. Just one squeeze would reduce Connie to a paste dripping through Milky’s fingers to splatter on the grimy school floor.

And now that same Gem was laughing and joking with Steven as though they’d been friends their entire lives.

“Connie?” Lapis nudged her out of the memory with a light touch. “Aren’t you going to skee your ball?”

Sucking in a deep breath, Connie shook her head. “You can play mine,” she said.

“Okay. I think I’m getting the hang of it!” As Connie moved aside, Lapis expanded her watery wings and reached down with them into the ball slot, sucking the whole row of balls at once to float lazily inside her translucent blue constructs. Then, turning her back to the machine, she stretched her wings and looked over her shoulder. Her tongue stuck through her teeth as she carefully funneled the balls suspended in her wings into the hundred-point basket one after the other.

As Connie backed away from the machine, she felt herself bump into someone behind her, and looked up to see Mister Smiley staring at the row of skee ball machines with an expression of growing horror. He didn’t even seem to notice his collision with Connie as he turned and began stalking toward the prize counter at the back of the arcade. “Hey! Hey, Darius! Get off your phone and go find a marker,” he shouted to the bored teen behind the counter. “Steven brought another bunch of ringers! We gotta add more zeros to those prize prices before they clean us out again!”

Slowly, Connie drifted sideways, keeping her footing carefully balanced, until she stood behind Milky Quartz. Her thumb rubbed against the folded seams of her sword hilt as she stared at the huge Gem’s back. The sounds of the arcade went distant, until Steven’s and Milky’s amiable chatter became little more than muffled noises, as the thunderous tempo of Connie’s heartbeat filled her ears.

It wouldn’t be easy. A big Quartz like Milky could take a lot of punishment. She would have to drive her blade all the way to the hilt to guarantee that Milky would poof. Connie could feel the electric tingle of Gem strength pulsing in her limbs as she summoned up the power she would need. Even then, she would need to put her full body into it. One quick, decisive stab… 

“What’s wrong?” Steven said.

The words cut through Connie’s thoughts, dissipating them with a guilty start as she thought he was speaking to her. But instead, his worried expression was aimed up at Milky, who frowned at her blinking high score on the digital board of her skee ball machine.

Milky’s mountainous shoulders rose in a shrug as she plonked her last skee ball into the hundred-point basket. “I dunno. This is great and all, but it’s not what I wanted to see when I came here.”

Lapis nodded as she finished wing-chuting all of the skee balls into the hundred-point basket of Connie’s abandoned machine. “It is a little boring once you figure out the trick to it.

Pearl finished her perfect game, and then gasped in delight as a stream of prize tickets cascaded from the base of the machine. “Oh, look! It rewards you with a little paper mess to clean!” she cried. Collecting the string of tickets, she began to carefully fold them over each other along the tearable seams, creating a tall stack of interconnected prize tickets. Then she plopped the tickets into a nearby garbage bin with a satisfied sigh. 

“These human machines are fun, but I guess I was hoping to see Gem machines. Like, maybe the kind you keep in your temple?” Milky said, tilting her rumbly voice as innocently as she could.

Her grip on the sword tightened as Connie looked up to Pearl, expecting the nod of agreement before her graceful mentor would draw a spear from her gemstone and lead the counterattack. Surely this blatant espionage demanded some kind of response in kind! But Pearl didn’t even notice her silent question, and was looking to Steven instead.

Tapping a finger to his chin, Steven considered the utterly insane request. His gaze drifted to Lapis, who idly wrapped her own line of tickets around her wrist in a paper bracelet. Brightening, he said, “How about instead, we go see some even better machines?”

Milky exclaimed, “Oh, yeah? Where?”

Connie bit the inside of her cheeks, her hand tightening around her sword’s hilt until it shook. 

The warp tunnel deposited them atop the pad on the farm, the white light giving way to warm sunshine and a sweet-smelling breeze. A peal of barking rose up through the fading chime of the pad as Pumpkin rushed to the edge of the barnyard, racing back and forth and barking frantically at the gaggle of them packed shoulder to shoulder atop the pad.

Connie bristled as she felt Milky begin to push through her to move off the pad. But before the huge Gem could step onto the gritty dirt, Lapis extended a wing to keep her in place. “Hold up,” Lapis warned her. “You’re gonna want to wait a minute before you start walking around.”

“Why?” Milky asked, looking with confusion at the seemingly innocuous dirt.

A trio of garbage cans rolled atop caterpillar treads through the open barn doors. All three of their lids cracked open, and three crackling dissipator tines emerged, as the lead can announced in a tinny, nasally voice, “Intruder detected! Intruder detected!”

Peridot followed impatiently behind the cans, dragging a disembodied metal leg behind her. “Are you three malfunctioning again? It’s just Lapis with—” Her eyes became huge behind her yellow visor as she caught sight of the full crowd on the warp pad. She dove behind one of her campers, skidding through the dirt to take cover behind its treads, and screamed, “Red alert! We’ve been compromised!”

With an irritated sigh, Pearl shook her head. “Honestly, she’s so dramatic,” the graceful Gem muttered.

Lapis’s wingtips curved around to rest on her hips in a disapproving gesture. “An eight-foot-tall ‘human’ just showed up unannounced. I think she’s allowed to be a little worried,” she retorted. The lithe blue Gem wore her arcade tickets woven through her hair like a paper laurel wreath.

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Steven called, “It’s okay, Peridot! She’s with us!”

“They’ve been taken prisoner!” wailed Peridot. “Lapis, flap your wings twice if you’re being coerced!”

Her wings retracted, and Lapis called, “This isn’t an attack. And, um, this isn’t who you think it is. It’s our new, er, ‘human’ friend, Not-Milky Quartz.”

“You can call me Milky if you want!” the hulking Quartz shouted helpfully. “It’s a human nickname that another human gave to me!”

Peridot stared at them in abject horror from behind her garbage can drone. “It’s worse than I thought: psychological conditioning! You’ve been brainwashed, just like Paulette was when she snuck off with that boy from the rival summer camp to canoodle in canoes!”

“Camp Pining Hearts Season Five, Episode Eighteen, ‘The Manchurian Camper Date,’” Lapis explained to a bewildered and confused Pearl. “Okay, maybe she’s overreacting a tiny bit. Steven, can you help me calm her down?”

At Steven’s nod, Lapis picked him up and flew him across the yard. They landed in safety beyond the edge of the minefield and began trying to coax Peridot out from behind her drone barricade. This left Connie and Pearl to awkwardly remain with Milky, who seemed content to wait in patient silence.

Connie strained all of her senses, keeping track of every sound and movement that Milky made. If the enemy Quartz even smelled wrongly for one instant, she would already be swinging. 

Though, alert as she was, Connie couldn’t help but notice the look of concern that Pearl snuck at her sidelong. It reminded Connie too much of those looks her parents shared with each other back when she’d been hiding Jade’s existence from them.

“I like your sword.”

The affable words rumbling from Milky Quartz startled Connie, and she nearly swung her blade around through the massive Gem’s kneecap hovering at face-level behind her. She forced herself to unclench enough that she could growl in reply. “Thanks…”

Chuckling, Milky said, “I never got the whole ‘weapons made from stuff’ thing the rebellion did. Why make weapons when you just have one in your Gem? And if they break, you can’t just pull a new one out unless you carry it around. So dumb!” she guffawed.

“Yep,” Connie grinded through her teeth.

“Well, except for that sword Pyrite brought back.”

Milky’s words froze Connie. She felt her thudding heartbeat trying to burst its way through her eardrums as she gripped her sword with shaking white knuckles.

“It’s this big, pink sword that she took from some weird little green mutant Beryl we fought one time. Pyrite says it’s the same one Rose Quartz used in the rebellion, but Flint and I think she’s full of gravel,” Milky chortled. “She’s always bragging about something. 

Connie heard the hardened sailcloth trembling in her hand, straining under her Gem-strong grip. It nearly drowned out Peridot as the tiny engineer shouted belligerently at Steven and Lapis. “No, she isn’t! Are you two cracked? You’re trying to tell me THAT is a human?” Peridot bellowed and pointed to the warp pad while Steven and Lapis gestured pleadingly for her to keep her voice low.

Wincing, Pearl glanced back at Milky, and said in a stilted tone, “You sure seem to know a lot about Gemkind for a human.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah!” Milky said. “It’s ‘cause I’m really smart. Way smarter than other humans.”

Across the barnyard, Peridot howled with frustration and ripped at her triangular yellow hair. “Fine!” she snapped, stamping her feet. “But don’t blame me when that ‘human’ squishes all of us!”

Connie’s eye twitched as Steven waved them forward. She let Milky go first, joining Pearl as they trailed behind the Quartz, ready to act in case Milky ever thought her brilliant ruse had run its course. But Milky seemed content to keep up her facade, and waved in greeting to the disgruntled Peridot.

“Hello…Not-Milky Quartz,” Peridot said haltingly. One of her campers kept its dissipator tines armed and ready next to her, and started to roll forward at the Quartz’s approach, until Peridot slapped a hand across its can with a hollow thwop to hold her camper at bay.

Lapis took the paper laurel from her hair and looped it over the tip of Peridot’s blond triangle in a crown of tickets. The small gift seemed to placate Peridot as Lapis said, “Would you like us to show you around, Milky?”

“Oh, I remember this place from the last time, when I…” Milky choked on her words, and she dragged the syllable out. “...when I…I…wasn’t here before! So yes, please show me around!”

“Nice save,” Connie grunted, ignoring Steven’s worried grimace.

“Thanks!” said Milky. “Now can I see your machines?”

“...sure.” Peridot waved a finger at her discarded metal leg, which floated back through the barn doors to rest on a messy tabletop with a number of other metallic body parts. Then, reluctantly, the little engineer led their group through the yard toward her command center on the grass.

“Oooooh!” cooed Milky. She loomed over the computer array, bending low to watch the data feeds streaming across a bank of old CRT screens clumped together to create a main display. A satellite dish made from scrap metal loomed over the array, shading it from the midday sun.

“This,” Peridot said, forgetting her reluctance as her pride seeped into her voice, “is my data hub and central control console. My campers, as well as the rest of the local defenses, are networked here through—”

Milky prodded the satellite dish with one giant finger. The huge dish tilted with a shriek of overtightened bolts, and its antenna shifted several degrees. All of the screens on the command center went blank with digital static. A stream of frantic beeping emerged from behind the monitors.

Hurriedly, Peridot waved a hand at the dish. It jerked back into its original position with a huffy burst of ferrokinesis. “Please refrain from touching anything during the tour!” Peridot snarled.

“Sorry,” said Milky, hardly sounding contrite. Her attention drifted to a small aerial antenna jutting from the side of the console, and she immediately began prodding at it in idle defiance of Peridot. “Ooh, this one is spiky!” she said as the aerial bent dangerously under her finger.

Lapis caught Peridot under the armpits and lifted her bodily from the ground as the tiny engineer reflexively pounced at Milky’s rough treatment of her equipment. As Lapis held her at arm’s length, Peridot silently fumed and flailed, her gestures and twisting expressions promising a violence against Milky that her diminutive form probably couldn’t deliver.

“Have you always been interested in machines, Milky?” Steven asked.

As she bent the antenna to and fro, Milky scoffed, and said, “Naw. I don’t care about machines much at all. I just wanted to help.”

Even Peridot stilled at the admission, and they all leaned forward. Despite herself, Connie felt her interest begin to overwhelm her anger.

“Help with what?” Steven asked, struggling to sound casual.

Shrugging, Milky said, “Well, Polarite has been having a hard time ever since that fusion blew up all her stuff when she got to Earth. She needs her machines to put the crystal hearts at the Forge into the Opulence, but that bad fusion blew up all her machines when she landed here. She’s really mad about it, which makes her yell at us a lot. I even offered to pick up one of the hearts for her, but she just called me dumb and told me to go away.”

Steven shared a surprised look with the rest of them. “That wasn’t very nice of her,” he said to Milky.

“I’m used to it. Anyway, I was talking about it with Flint, and I said, ‘The Crystal Gems have been on Earth for a long time. Maybe they have machines like the ones Polarite needs.’ And Flint, she says,” and Milky pitched her voice into a parody of Flint’s, “‘Right then, Milky. Why don’t you just pop on over to their base and ask them if they have any gizmos to spare? Or better yet, snoop around and find out on the sly. They definitely wouldn’t catch you in two jankin’ seconds!’ And so that’s what I did!” Milky finished, beaming with pride.

Connie felt her heart racing. Evidently, things were not all rosy on Shard’s side of the conflict. Those crates they had been unloading when she and Garnet had stumbled across their landing in the strawberry battlefield, the crates Garnet had destroyed, had been vital to their efforts. And whatever the Opulence was, it needed crystal hearts, plural, to function. Peridot’s suppositions about their needing the resources of the Celerity Forge had been precisely correct.

“Oh!” Milky said, jerking in sudden realization. “Forget all that stuff I just said. You’re not supposed to know any of that.”

“We will,” Steven assured her, and patted her arm.

“Good,” Milky sighed, and wiped at her brow. “So, do you have any other machines that would impress a human like me? Maybe machines that could move a crystal heart from one place to another?”

“Let’s continue the tour,” Peridot said. Her voice broke somewhere between resigned defeat and surprised optimism as they left the command console and its bent aerial behind them. Though the little engineer had ceased her struggles, Lapis seemed content to keep carrying her, following along as Peridot pointed them elsewhere in the farm.

Connie began to follow behind Pearl in the tour, but stopped when she felt Steven’s hand on her shoulder. She looked back, startled to find his worried expression aimed at her, and not at their would-be spy. “You guys go on ahead,” he called to the others. “We’ll catch up.”

As the rest of them moved on, Connie lingered with Steven. Part of her held out hope that he was ready to end this scheme and start talking battle strategy. That sliver of hope evaporated as she watched his bottom lip curl at her in a look of profound concern.

“Connie, what’s wrong?” he said, speaking in low tones to keep his voice from carrying across the barnyard.

“Nothing,” she said automatically. When his watery eyes lingered on her meaningfully, she jerked her shoulder out from under his hand. “What? Why does something need to be wrong?” she snapped, fighting to keep her own voice between them like his.

“Something is wrong,” he insisted. “And it really worries me that you won’t talk about it.”

Fighting down her impatience, Connie said, “Steven, we’re wasting time. Milky is—”

As Connie tried to walk past him, Steven’s hand caught hers. She stiffened as she felt his warm touch wrap around the knuckles clutching the hilt of her sword. Her eyes snapped to his, angry and hard, and a fury swelled in her chest. 

No one else had ever touched her sailcloth sword but her. It was one of the few things about her life in the Crystal Gems that was truly, wholly her own. It was the only physical link she had to Jade besides the empty stone hanging beneath her throat.

The idea of anyone else, even her best friend, trying to take it from her, made her tremble with rage.

Steven’s eyes were warm and dark as they met hers. “I get it,” he insisted.

Her rage swelled, and she fought to swallow it down.

“Milky has done some bad things,” Steven continued, oblivious to the bulging walls of the half-hollow inside of her. “To you. To all of us. But from the sound of it, she’s never had a chance to be anything but a bad guy. We can show her there’s a better way to live here on Earth. That she doesn’t have to just fight us, or lift things for Gems who are mean to her.”

Gradually, Connie felt her fingers loosen under Steven’s light touch. She forced herself to breathe with slow, even draws. The roiling ball of anger inside her began to settle.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” Steven murmured, “if she didn’t always have to be fighting?” He let the weight of his hand settle atop hers, gently pressing the tip of her sword into the dirt.

Connie wavered. Everything outside of her half-hollow ached with his words. Her knuckles cracked as her ferocious grip on her sword began to uncoil.

Then she heard a familiar tolling of chimes coming from behind the barn, and her vision went white.

Something happened after that, and Connie couldn’t remember how. There was the pounding of her sneakers on the dry, bare soil. Her breath ripped through her teeth, her arms pumping at her side, her sailcloth sword a blur of green beside her. But everything snapped into crystal clarity as she tore around the corner of the barn and saw the little clearing behind it.

There, amidst a little muddy patch in the middle of the grass, stood a pair of long musical chimes. Each of the parallel rows had been constructed out of old piping, with a striking bar made from old two-by-four planks. It was Jade’s zephyrphone. One of the last physical links they still had to the departed Gem.

Milky stood inside the parallel chimes, grinning as she idly plonked the individual pipes with her finger, while Peridot seemingly explained its function. With each prod of Milky’s gargantuan finger, the zephyrphone hummed, creating a pleasant discordance as the Quartz laughed and poked.

“GET AWAY FROM THAT!” The words shook the air like the roar of a lion. And only when Milky, Pearl, Lapis, and Peridot whirled around to stare at her in shock did Connie realize that the roar had come from her.

As Connie charged at the stunned and startled Milky, she heard a tinny approximation of Peridot’s voice behind her speak in monotone: “Aggressor detected. Neutralizing.”

Connie’s whole world turned blue, and she felt the ground drop out from under her. An all-encompassing sensation pressed her clothes into her body and flattened her hair against her scalp. Her hand flew open in shock, but the sword didn’t tumble from her grasp, instead being pressed into her palm by whatever energy had ensnared her. Thrashing, she twisted in midair, trying to see what had caught her.

Three of Peridot’s trash can drones had been lurking near the Gems’ tour, presumably to guard against Milky’s sudden but inevitable betrayal. At Connie’s surprise attack, the mechanical trio had each produced some sort of projector from under their lids. Blue light streamed from the projectors, converging upon Connie to wrap her inside some energized force strong enough to lift her off the ground and levitate her in place. With each frantic motion, Connie could see the cans wobble and adjust their projectors, but they didn’t seem troubled by the limited pushback Connie could feel through the blue force.

As Connie glared hatefully at Milky, the enormous Quartz lumbered backwards. Her hammerhead weapon had manifested reflexively at the attack. The weapon dissipated into white motes as she meekly staggered out from the parallel chimes and drew her fingers together contritely. “I’m sorry!” she said, ducking her shaggy mane in apology.

“Connie?” Pearl exclaimed, aghast at the sight of her student clawing at her bonds. “What happened? What’s wrong?” Behind her, Lapis had sprouted her wings and looked ready to leap into the sky, her eyes wide and darting about in fear of some unnoticed danger.

“If you were going to initiate a surprise attack, you could at least have coordinated with us first!” Peridot added testily. Glancing at her mechanized guards, she added in a commanding voice, “Campers: deactivate containment beams.”

The blue envelope pressing around Connie vanished, and she dropped to the ground. Her sword skirted from her hand as the unexpected short fall knocked the wind out of Connie. She lay on her stomach, struggling to get her elbows underneath her as she fought for breath.

As she fumbled for her sword, Steven came puffing around the corner after her, and stopped short of tripping over her. “Connie!” he cried breathlessly.

Connie ignored him as she snatched her sword up and threw herself off of the ground to pounce at Milky. But Pearl was quicker, stepping in front of Connie with her back to the huge enemy Quartz. “It’s okay, Steven,” Pearl said, and gazed down at Connie with a look of surprise.

…and disappointment.

Seeing her mentor’s curdled expression broke Connie from her anger. She felt her half-hollow plummet inside of her as her hand went numb, and her weapon slipped from her grasp. The sailcloth sword evaporated into green motes before it reached the ground again.

“Wow,” Milky said, oblivious to the shift in mood around her. She approached one of the campers and poked at it with her enormous finger hard enough to tip it up onto one set of caterpillar treads. “I’ve never seen security drones like these before. Why are they so funny-looking?”

Seemingly also oblivious to the shift, Peridot set her fists on her hips and puffed with pride. “Well, actually, the campers are of my own design. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy replicating so many standard security functions with repurposed human technology, but I—”

“Wait!” Milky exclaimed, her astonishment plowing through Peridot’s self-aggrandizing to cut it short. “Are you telling me you can make Gem machines with stuff on Earth?”

“...yes? It’s not difficult,” Peridot said, unclenching after Milky’s outburst proved more complimentary than combative. “Actually, it is extremely difficult, but with the right materials and enough patience, and genius, almost any Gem technology can be replicated on Earth. Of course, in some cases, it isn’t practical. I did some calculating, and the facility I would need to produce plastanium on Earth using human equivalents would be about a quarter the side of their moon—”

Without warning, Milky snatched up the camper she’d been examining. The fingers of her giant fist nearly wrapped around the full girth of the trash can as she lifted it and began running. “Sorry, but I have to go now!” she cried, and barrelled past Steven around the side of the barn.

“Nikki!” Peridot screamed, falling to her knees and reaching out for her lost camper.

The little Gem’s cry broke Connie out of her inward spiral, and she launched herself after Milky Quartz. Behind her, she could hear Pearl following close. A streak of blue flitted above her, zipping over the roof of the barn, as Lapis took the direct path toward the yard on the far side of the armored building. And far behind them all, the rest of Peridot’s campers mobilized to save their comrade, but were far too slow to give chase.

As Connie pelted after the escaping Quartz, she heard the little kidnapped trash can’s treads whirring in a futile attempt to escape. “Aggressor detected. Neutralizing,” Nikki said in its calm approximation of Peridot’s voice. Its lid began to crack for some new weapon or deterrent. But Milky simply mashed her free hand onto the can’s lid, forcing it shut, causing Nikki to bleep, “Error. Error. Error. Error.”

Connie pumped her legs, trying to keep up, but Milky proved to be faster than she looked. As she and Pearl rounded the barn, Connie saw their quarry heading straight for the warp pad. At the center of the yard, the drill pond’s water rose upward in a column, commanded into the sky by Lapis high overhead. The top of the vertical river bulged, segmenting itself into a five-fingered hand that cast a long shadow across the farm’s warp pad.

As the river-arm descended upon Milky, its broad shadow narrowing as the tons of water loomed closer and closer, the Quartz jumped onto the warp pad. “Thanks for showing me around! See you later, friends!” Milky shouted, and offered one last wave of her smaller hand before a warp tunnel whisked her off the pad. An instant later, the hand of water impacted, crashing overtop the crystalline platform and creating a long, sloppy puddle that carved the barnyard in half.

Skidding to a stop at the edge of the puddle, Connie stared in disbelief at the empty warp pad. As she did, Pearl ducked around her and leapt, crossing the puddle with an arabesque leap. When she touched down on the pad, her face set with an expression of determination, and she straightened as if to activate the pad and pursue Milky into warp space. But the pad beneath her remained dark. “What on Earth…” she said, looking down at the crystal underneath her.

“Out of the way!” Peridot howled, and barrelled onto the pad with her arms outstretched. She bowled Pearl off of the platform, then collapsed to her knees, drawing her finger across the pad. As she did, a series of Gem glyphs appeared in luminous script atop the pad. Connie’s booked translation algorithm gave her the bad news an instant before Peridot snarled the words aloud. “Destination Restricted! How? We’re connected to both terrestrial networks now!”

Lapis landed beside her, resting a comforting hand on her barnmate’s shoulder as Peridot pounded her fists on the pad. “Does she have a cell phone on her? Maybe you could do a Find A Phone like you did with mine when I lost—”

“No!” snapped Peridot. Tears rimmed her eyes as she glared up at Lapis through her yellow visor. “I used cellular components in her design to interface with my command center, but it’s only viable in a local network! I never intended for any of them to leave the farm! Nikki wasn’t ready for that!” She collapsed into tears, 

Rolling her eyes, Pearl scoffed, “Oh, calm down. You still have five of these things left,” and gestured back to the other campers, who had only just then caught up with the speedier Gems. But Pearl’s tone softened when she saw a crestfallen Steven staring at the dark warp pad, his mouth curled in disappointment. “I’m sorry, Steven. It was a good try.”

“Yeah,” Lapis agreed, as she rubbed soothing circles into Peridot’s back while the little engineer bawled. “You couldn’t have known she would rob us.”

“Maybe,” Steven hedged. “But we knew she was…”

Connie could feel his gaze shift to the back of her head, but she refused to turn around. With fists clenched at her sides, she watched Peridot lament the loss of her camper, while the roiling ball of anger pushed at the walls of her half-hollow until the emptiness was fit to burst.

“...dangerous,” Steven finished lamely.

As the remaining Gems present stood helpless to chase the escaped spy back to her lair, the remaining five campers formed a straight row behind Peridot. Four of the cans began to resonate as their vocalizers sang the Camp Pining Hearts theme song, and the fifth can flipped its lid open. A short flagpole extended upward from the open lid, and a homemade camp flag rose solemnly upward to flutter in the breeze while the campers mourned their fallen sister.

Chapter Text

Precious few books remained in the dream ocean. Each stack of books she brought back to shore no longer teetered in her arms. It had become a struggle just to collect a full armload on each trip.

As she wind-skated over the gentle waves toward the beach, she marveled at how her collection had grown. Her nights of working in the dreamscape had yielded tremendous progress, even while those long hours of dream-toiling left her exhausted each morning. The sailcloth blankets she’d laid end to end now stretched the entire length of the beach, each one with full and towering stacks of books that filled nearly every inch of the metallic green fabric. 

Adding her latest catch to a stack near the end of the row, Connie took a moment’s rest, and stared back at the black ocean beneath the sky of stars. A few volumes still glinted in the pale light, barely visible when the low waves lifted them. But it was becoming clear that her work was nearing its end. Soon, all of the books would be stacked on the beach.

Beneath the sense of accomplishment she felt, Connie couldn’t ignore the niggling dread that squirmed underneath it. She still couldn’t read any of the books, though not for lack of trying. Over and over, Connie had poured through the books’ pages, laying them together to join their pages, or drawing in the sand to try and recreate the strange diagrams and scribblings she found between the covers. Occasionally, she would find a letter, or a gem glyph, but never enough to suggest an entire word or a cohesive idea. The contents of the books remained frustratingly inscrutable.

Once she had found them all, what came next? The books had a connection to Jade, for each one bore her name on its cover. But what were they? If she found them all, would a message reveal itself? 

If she found them all, could they somehow bring Jade back?

Gathering the dream winds at her back again, Connie renewed her resolve to find out. She jogged back toward the ocean, preparing to jump atop its waves and wind-skate back toward the horizon.

“Whoa, look at all the books!”

The sudden exclamation from behind startled Connie, and she lost her focus. The wind shoved her facedown into the surf as she lost her footing, and her nose plowed a trench ahead of her as she landed hard on the wet sand. Coughing, sputtering, she rolled over, her eyes darting up and down the row of stacks to find the source of the voice.

Rounding the end of the stacks, Steven gazed up at the sheer height of the books towering above his stocky frame. “There are so many,” he said in amazement. “Have you read them all? With your booking power, you must have by now!”

“Steven?” Connie’s mind struggled to bridge their dream surroundings with the waking world she’d left behind. The only other time he had visited her dreamscape had been to contact her after her parents’ discovery of Jade and their subsequent freakout that had isolated Connie from Steven and the Gems. He hadn’t trod into her dreaming since then. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“Don’t you remember? We were reading The Unfamiliar Familiar, and I noticed you had fallen asleep,” Steven told her.

A sliver of guilt cut through her as the morning’s events came back to her. She had awoken late, groggy after a night of hunting dream books, and rolled out of bed to shuffle into some clothes for jogging. But Steven had been waiting for her on the couch with toaster strudel in one hand and her favorite book in the other, eager for them to spend the day together.

Not wanting to say no to him yet again, Connie had consigned herself to lay on the couch with her head in his lap, listening to Lisa’s adventures in the Forgotten Castle and nibbling on a frosted breakfast. At some point, the soothing sound of Steven’s voice had won out against her leaden body, sending her back into her dreams, where she’d resumed her work on the black ocean.

A blur of pink motion yanked her out of her remembering, and Connie’s guts twisted into knots as Steven Gem-jumped to the top of a stack and plucked a book from its perch. He cracked the book open and rifled through its pages as he floated gently back to the sand. 

“Steven…” Connie said, fighting to keep her tone gentle.

The book twisted to and fro in his grasp as he tried to make sense of its contents. “What is all of this stuff? It looks complicated,” he said.

“Steven,” she said again, her voice threaded with alarm.

“Are any of them different?” Tucking the one book underarm, he began to peer into her book piles, his finger slipping against the pages as if to catch a glimpse of what lay tucked between the stacked covers. The towers wobbled at his touch, covers rasping against each other as they shifted dangerously.

Connie darted forward to snatch the book from him. “Steven, don’t!” she cried.

Her shout startled him, and he whirled around just as her hand brushed the book he cradled underarm. Staggering forward, she crashed into him, and pushed the both of them into the side of the stack.

A wall of books crumbled around them. Volumes tumbled off their heads and shoulders as the stack caught Steven, pushing inward to cradle him, sending an avalanche of books sliding out from either side of the great book wall Connie had built. Ten stacks deep, the books slipped and fell, plopping into the sand beyond the edge of their green sailcloth blankets. Pages rifled open, covers bent, the books finally settled again into a curved vertical crater centered around Steven.

Steven blanched, pushing an open book off of his face to reveal an expression of horror. “I…I’m sorry,” he stammered. 

Connie barely heard him. Her ears rang with the sound of her own rushing blood as she stared, transfixed, at the ruins of her hard work. Dozens of covers stared back at her from the pile and up at her from the sand, the name on their cover shaming her with their disappointment: Jade.

Hurriedly, he began to sweep the books back together, smoothing their pages as he shut and stacked their covers together in a haphazard attempt at repairing the mess. “Here, I’ll help you fix—”

“Get OUT!” Connie’s shout rattled the beach itself as she stepped forward and shoved Steven, both of her hands planted on his chest. Her shove threw them apart with enough force to tear the dreamscape in two.

The waking world slammed into Connie as she rolled off of the couch, off of Steven’s lap, and landed on the hardwood floor of the beach house. 

She heard him gasp awake as she clambered onto her hands and knees. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him curl into a ball on the couch, coiling around her copy of The Unfamiliar Familiar. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” he yelped.

Her eyes lingered on the floorboards, her head hanging low. A cold numbness tingled in her body, but her insides danced like fire. 

“I-I can put it back the way I found it,” he stammered. “If you just fall asleep again—”

“Why couldn’t you just leave them alone?” Her voice was a knife’s edge, a trembling threat. She couldn’t even look at him. 

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just, you’ve been sleeping more lately, and you aren’t talking to me anymore, and I was worried. And when I went into your dream, I saw the temple, and my house—”

“That’s my place,” Connie growled, pushing herself to her feet. “That’s where Jade and I met. That’s where she…” Her breath hitched in her throat, and she squeezed her eyes shut, holding them tightly against a flood of sudden memories that threatened to spill down her cheeks. She tried stuffing them into her half-hollow, but the space inside of her was fit to burst, too full to live up to its name anymore. Its walls seethed and steamed, bulging with incredible pressure.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have gone there without asking you first. I’m sorry,” Steven said.

A slow breath whistled out her nose, and the pressure began to ease. 

“I get it,” he added.

The door to the half-hollow burst from its hinges. Everything inside of it exploded through the breach to drown the rest of her.

“My mom’s room—” Steven continued, oblivious.

Connie whirled on him, her eyes hot and blurry. “You DON’T get it!” she shouted, hurling the words like daggers. 

Steven drew his knees up to his chest, huddling on the couch as though her voice really had pierced him. “Wh-What?” he stammered. “But…”

“EVERYTHING here is yours! Your house, your temple, and the arena, and the strawberries! Everything the Gems built! I had ONE place that was just for me, even if it was in my own stupid brain!” Connie said hotly. 

A shadow of stubbornness furrowed Steven’s brow. “That’s not true!” he exclaimed. “You live here now too!”

“But I don’t!” Connie retorted. Her burning eyes whipped back to the little foldout cot, not yet stowed after the night before, and the open footlocker of her meager things resting on the floor next to it. “Nothing of mine even fits around here! It’s just another reminder that I don’t belong here either!”

She kicked the cot, tipping its nest of blankets onto the floor. The aluminum frame bounced across the floor with a satisfying clack!

“Hey, my dad got that for you!” Steven slid off of the couch with his fists balled at his sides, his dark brows crashing together to overshadow the tears rimming his eyes. “If you hate it here so much, why did you want to come here for the summer?”

“So I wouldn’t blow my parents’ house down!” Connie snapped, throwing up her hands.

A lie. They both knew it. She could see it in his face.

Losing a step, Connie fumbled for a more believable answer. “Because I wanted to spend time with…”

Closer. So close to the truth. A large part of the truth. But not all.

Swallowing hard, Connie dropped her hands, and forced herself to say the one thing she’d never wanted Steven to hear.

“Because I thought I could be like you,” she said.

His features softened, his frown becoming one of confusion. “What? But you are like me.”

“No, I’m not,” she insisted, crossing her arms and twisting away. 

“Of course you—”

“I’m not!” she snapped. Her eyes wobbled dangerously as she glared at him, holding her tears back through sheer force of will. “Don’t you get it, Steven? All of this—the temple, and all of the ruins, and even the Crystal Gems—it’s all yours! It’s your birthright! You have this amazing magical destiny, and you can’t even see it!”

“I don’t have a destiny!” Steven retorted angrily.

Connie clutched at her temples, biting back a snarl of frustration. Did he think she was stupid? That she hadn’t noticed after all this time how everything in Beach City, everything having to do with the ancient aliens who had shaped their world, all revolved around him? 

“You’re special,” she shot back at him. “You’ve always been special. And the fact that you won’t admit it drives me crazy sometimes!”

“I’m special?” he huffed in disbelief. “Look at yourself! You can already use so many different powers! It took me twelve years of trying just to make my mom’s shield appear once! Then it took practically forever just to figure out that thinking about her and how she cared about everyone is what made it appear at all! You got your Gem months ago, and—”

“It’s NOT MY GEM!”

The force of her scream rattled the house as it physically knocked him back a step, buffeting his curly dark hair and billowing through his clothes. 

Chest heaving, eyes hot and raw, Connie glared at him and clutched the green rock set beneath her throat. “You get to think about your mom whenever you make your shield. Do you know what I have to think about when I draw my sword?”

Steven looked torn between shrinking back from her acrid tone and volleying it back at her. “What?” he said.

“I have to remember Jade dying. Every time.” As she spoke the words aloud, the floodgates of her eyes broke, and tears poured down her cheeks. “I felt her leave, Steven. Her voice, her thoughts, her feelings…it all got smaller and smaller, until she was just…gone.”

“You told me she left,” Steven said quietly. “You didn’t talk about what happened during…”

“I had a whole other person living inside of me. Every moment, even when she wasn’t talking to me, I could feel her. And now that she’s gone, I’m just empty.” Her half-hollow throbbed as everything she’d spent so long carefully stuffing into it came tumbling out of her mouth. “And it’s my fault. It was supposed to be me.”

There, on the beach, Connie had stood helpless while Jade had vanished, journeying into the void in Connie’s stead. And though Connie had begged and pleaded, Jade did not hesitate. The memory came easily, as it had so many other times before, when Connie needed to summon the sailcloth sword. Even now, she could feel it pressing on the other side of the gemstone, expecting her. But she fought down the stone’s glow.

“No, it’s—”

She stomped over Steven’s words. “I promised her I would do it! She helped us save Sapphire, and in exchange, I was supposed to…  But I got scared, and she saw that, and her corruption was spreading, so she…she…!” Her voice broke, and the rest of her words collapsed into ragged sobs.

Steven was speechless. His hand drifted over his stomach, unconsciously clutching the gemstone underneath his shirt.

The motion didn’t escape Connie, and she scowled. “That’s why you don’t get it,” she snapped. “You’ve always had your own Gem, because your mom was already—”

Connie clapped her hands over her mouth, too late. Her heart shrank as she watched Steven’s tears pouring down his cheeks. His lip trembled, and his breath grew shaky, but he said nothing.

A tempest exploded around Connie. Ferocious winds howled, far stronger than the tornado she had summoned in her parents’ living room. Pictures on the walls tore free from their mountings. The discarded cot clattered across the floor and smacked into the window, cracking the glass and ripping the blinds down. Furniture rattled, knickknacks went flying into the storm that consumed the beach house from the inside.

As her hair whipped sideways into the force of the gale, Connie tried to claw the winds back. But the sanctity of her half-hollow had been torn apart, and the precious control she had spent weeks carefully building had vanished. Even as she closed her eyes and tried to imagine a construct, just as Jade had taught her, she could only see Steven’s heartbroken features streaked with tears.

“Connie!” Steven’s voice fought through the winds. Opening her eyes, she saw him struggling to stand, reaching out for her, unable to rise from the floor or else he’d be blown away. Smaller knickknacks bounced off of him. Larger objects, like pictures, or the television from his loft, whizzed by him, dangerously close to knocking his head from his shoulders.

As long as she stayed, Steven would be in danger. Either the winds would hurt him, or her words would. And she couldn’t stand to do either to him any longer.

Unable to stop the wind, Connie lurched toward the back of the house. The tempest moved with her, shifting the room’s whirling contents deeper into the open floor of Steven’s home. As fast as she could manage in the fierce winds, Connie lurched onto the warp pad.

“Connie, no!” Steven cried.

His hand reached for her, his Quartz strength pushing him across the floor, stubbornly refusing to let her leave. She turned just long enough to mouth the words he deserved, that he could never hear above the roar of her storm, before the warp pad launched her away from him.

“I’m sorry…”

Chapter Text

The Crystal Gems searched Ascension to no avail. Their footsteps echoed off of the high walls, bouncing off of the mosaic art of the Diamonds who long since abandoned the Earth to its own fate. The transparent crystal ceiling rang with their shouts, but no one answered. A low hum whispered from the grand staircase at the far end of the terminal that led to the landing pad above, but it was only the sound of the wind moving through the mountain peaks enshrouding the ancient, secret place.

“Connie? Connie!” Steven’s voice resonated throughout the enormous space, tinged with worry and growing desperation. “Connie, if you’re here, please come out!”

Amethyst’s bounding steps carried her down the stairs. “She’s not up there,” she called to the others. “Just like in the strawberry field, and just like up at the arena. Steven, how did you lose her, anyway? Couldn’t you just follow her through the warp pad?”

“I tried!” Steven insisted. “I think she kept warping away to different spots. I followed her to the arena, then to the strawberries, then to that freaky underground honeycomb bunker she and Garnet went to, then to the laundry machines, then back to—”

“We get the point, Steven.” Pearl’s sigh wafted up to the high ceiling. “The truth is, Connie is smart and resourceful. Now that she can use the warp network, I’m not sure if we can find her unless she wants to be found.”

“But we can’t give up!” Steven cried.

“We won’t,” Garnet reassured him. “With Shard’s forces on Earth, it’s not safe for any of us to be alone. We need to find her before anything happens to her.”

“Plus,” Amethyst added, as their collective footsteps dwindled toward the warp pad, “if we lose Connie, her mom will straight-up grind us into powder.”

“Yes,” Pearl agreed worriedly.

“She is a formidable human,” Garnet deadpanned.

The four of them shuffled onto the warp pad. Cupping his hands to his mouth, Steven called, “Connie? If you can hear me, please come back! I’m sorry! We can fix everything, I promise! Just…please come back.”

A crystal chime rang as the warp pad transported them. And only when the bright light and echoing ring of the warp tunnel had faded from Ascension did Connie let go of the soft, whispered sobs she had kept clutched tightly in her chest.

High up in the sprawling mosaic of Pink Diamond, one of the tiles comprising her bouffant hair had fallen from its settings. The pink tile had shattered on the floor below, its shards long since swept away by millennia of weather and neglect, leaving behind a gap in the wall little bigger than a perfectly cubic closet. There, in that tiny cavity, Connie lay curled on the cold stone, her face buried in her bare knees, her tears soaking through the legs of her shorts.

It had been agony, listening to the Crystal Gems searching for her, wanting to call out to them, to reassure them that she was fine. But she couldn’t, because she wasn’t. 

“You’ve always had your own Gem, because your mom was already—”

Her own awful words kept rolling over and over in her head. She could still see Steven’s tearful face, no matter how hard she squeezed her eyelids. Yet there he was, searching desperately for her, as though she were the one who needed help and comfort instead of him.

You’re not much of a Gem after all, are you? the voice inside of her whispered. You’re certainly no Crystal Gem. After today, you might not even deserve to be a human. Where does that leave you?

Connie could only shudder in reply, wrapping her arms around her knees even tighter and squeezing herself into a ball. Her half-hollow had somehow expanded to fill her entire body, making her a roiling whole hollow. Yet the feelings still wouldn’t stop. The memory kept repeating, forcing her to relive how awful she was.

She wanted to fix it. Wanted to make it right. But what could she do when the thing wrong with her was herself?

Your first instincts are your best, human. You knew all along that my gemstone never belonged inside the likes of you.  

Slowly, Connie unfurled herself, staring tearily up at the craggy ceiling hewn from the stone of the walls. She knew what she had to do.

And she knew who could help.

When the warp tunnel deposited Connie at the farm, the sun hung low above the horizon, brushing against the tasseled tops of the corn stalks in the field. Her shadow stretched out before her as she staggered off of the crystal pad, little caring about the minefield lurking beneath the dirt crunching under her sneakers.

Evidently, the gloop mines were dormant, as Connie saw Peridot standing with her back to the pad, swiping at a floating cloud of her jailbroken smartphones, each one with a different piece of a map on its screen. “Yes, yes,” Peridot said impatiently, and slowly rotated her array of screens to look back at the pad. “I’m coming, Steven. I just need to optimize this new search pattern so we can find—CONNIE JADE!”

The phones all dropped to the ground at once as Peridot sprang forward and grabbed up one of Connie’s hands, squeezing it excitedly and hopping from foot to foot. Connie’s hand hung limply in hers as the little engineer began to jabber.

“Wait until we tell everyone I was the one to find you! My search algorithm was so optimized, I didn’t even need it! Come on, let’s…” As she tugged Connie’s hand toward the warp pad, Connie remained stuck in place. Frowning, Peridot craned her gaze low to try and meet Connie’s downcast look. “Connie Jade?”

“I need you to take it out,” Connie said hoarsely.

“Take what out?” asked Peridot, confused.

“Jade’s gemstone,” said Connie. “I need you to take it out.” Even as she fought to keep her tone calm and resolute, she could feel a fresh wave of tears bubbling down her cheeks.

Peridot dropped Connie’s hand as she reeled backwards in shock. “What? Have you cracked? I can’t just remove your stone!”

“Take it out,” Connie said, hating herself for the rising desperation in her voice. “I don’t care what you have to do. Go get your circular saw, or build a scooping machine. It doesn’t matter. You have to take it out.”

“Connie Jade,” Peridot began.

“I’m not Jade!” Connie sobbed. She crushed her eyes shut, trying without success to stem the tide of tears. “I’m not even really me anymore! I’m not supposed to be this way! So please, I just need—”

Something warm and firm lurched into her, and Connie opened her blurry eyes to a faceful of stiff yellow hair. Peridot’s arms wrapped around her waist as the little engineer buried her face into Connie’s V-neck shirt, holding her tightly without another word.

“Wh-What are you doing?” Connie said.

When Peridot looked up, Connie was shocked to see tears shimmering behind the Gem’s visor. “I’m sorry,” Peridot said, her voice breaking. “My time on Earth has suggested that, when you don’t know how else to help someone, you should hug them. It’s probably stupid, but…”

Connie’s arms wrapped around her, crushing Peridot in a desperate embrace. Her voice dissolved into silent heaves as she held the little Gem and cried.

She couldn’t be certain how long they stood there, embracing, before she heard the sound of flapping coming from above. “Peridot? Are you still here? This map you gave me isn’t as helpful as you said it would… CONNIE?”

When Connie looked up, she saw Lapis landing in the barnyard next to them. A page of paper flittered from her hand and landed face-up on the dirt, revealing a printout of a blurry, pixelated map of the globe with a squiggly path drawn atop it in red marker.

The blue Gem started forward, but then hesitated when she saw Connie’s and Peridot’s tear-streaked faces. “What happened?”

“I need your assistance, please,” Peridot told Lapis. Then, as if to explain, she plunged herself back into Connie, hugging her tightly.

Needing no further words, Lapis knelt down and wrapped both of them into her cool arms. Her wings enfolded them for good measure, cocooning the pair in a translucent veil.

Connie felt the last of her resolve crumble. Her legs gave out, and she leaned into the two Gems, kept upright by their silent, steadying presence while she cried herself empty again.

The colors of sunset spilled in through the barn doors as Connie settled herself onto a stack of flatpack crates next to one of Peridot’s worktables. She rubbed uselessly at her face, which felt crusty after an emotional afternoon. Lapis leaned against the corner of the table, seemingly unwilling to leave Connie alone for even a moment, as though the Gem feared she might disappear. Which, now that Connie had regained some semblance of stability again, did seem like a fair concern, considering how she had fled from the beach house.

Peridot returned with a box of durian juice and a dusty Protes bar. “Sorry we don’t have anything better,” Peridot said, and handed the food to Connie. “Nobody really eats around here, so we just keep a few things in case we come across a hungry animal, or if Amethyst gets cranky.”

The demands of her stomach caught up with Connie the instant she held the food. She tore the Protes bar open and buried half of it in her mouth. “Fank’oo,” she mumbled gratefully around the block of fiber-y chocolate and proteins. 

“Connie, what’s going on?” Lapis said, leaning down with a concerned look on her delicate features. “Steven said you ran away.”

Her eyes began to wobble again, but Connie kept them at bay with a steadying breath. “I said terrible things to Steven. Things I can’t ever take back, no matter how much I want to.”

“Why? Did Steven provoke you?” Peridot said.

“No!” cried Connie, as a wave arose from her half-hollow. She tamped it down, and said more calmly, “No. He was just trying to be a good friend. A best friend. And I got angry and hurt him.”

“Well, I’m sure he’ll forgive you if you’re sorry,” Lapis said encouragingly.

The wave pushed harder, and Connie had to lean with her full mental weight to stuff it back into her half-hollow and lock the lid again. “No,” she said.

“Of course he will!” exclaimed Peridot. “Why, Lapis and I have both tried to kill him before, and now we’re his closest friends!”

A dark blush colored Lapis’s cheeks. “I kinda tried to kill you too,” she reminded Connie. “Sorry about that. I hope we’re cool now.”

“He shouldn’t forgive me!” Connie insisted. “I don’t deserve it!”

Peridot looked bewildered, as though the string of words couldn’t possibly fit together. “What? Why not?”

“Because I’m awful! I’m mean, and weak, and useless!” Connie said. Her forehead fell to her hands, smudging Protes bar into her hairline as she cradled her face. “I’ve been a complete mess ever since Jade…left.”

“...and you’ve felt like this the whole time?” Lapis murmured. When Connie nodded, the blue Gem wilted. “But why didn’t you say anything?”

Connie squirmed under Lapis’s worried expression. The disappointment and concern radiating in her expression was everything Connie had wanted to avoid. “I dunno,” she mumbled. “I mean, what am I supposed to say? That I feel bad and wrong just for existing?”

“YES!”

The sudden shout from Peridot made Connie reel backwards in surprise, the juice box tumbling from her hand to gush upon the floor strewn with sawdust. She gaped in apprehensive shock as Peridot huffed and fumed.

Peridot began to pace the floor, lecturing in a tight, strained voice. “When something is wrong, you’re supposed to tell your friends! How else are we supposed to know?” she shouted.

“I…I’m sorry…” Connie stammered in a small voice.

But Peridot didn’t slow down. Her words came tumbling faster as she waved her hands in manic gestures. “I’m a Kindergartener! My whole purpose is to foster the development of new Gems! If I can’t notice when a new Gem is struggling, what good am I? What’s the point of me? How can I even call myself your friend?”

To Connie’s surprise, she watched tears skirting out from under Peridot’s yellow visor. “Peridot, it’s—”

“I should just dissipate my form! Feed myself into a rejuvenator and start all over again!” Peridot continued, her voice breaking. “All this time, you’ve been feeling miserable because I couldn’t come up with a workable dissolution method to separate your components! I couldn’t devise a better long-term workaround to corruption! I thought you would be okay once your two components were running on a single consciousness, but I…I didn’t know that…”

Lapis floated over to the weeping Peridot and knelt down, hugging the little Gem tightly. Connie wanted to do the same, but the confession had left her legs rubbery and limp. “Peridot, it’s okay,” Connie said hoarsely. “It’s not your fault at all.”

As she leaned into Lapis’s embrace, Peridot pulled the visor from her face and swiped at her bare eyes with the back of her arm, sniffling loudly. “I’m so sorry, Connie Jade. I had no working data for non-physical stress and maintenance on humans. My only other available data came from Steven, and he’s always so happy that I must have unconsciously developed a skewed baseline for it.”

Connie couldn’t help but laugh, though it came out bitterly and short. “Steven’s way better at that than I am,” she admitted. “But it’s still not your fault, Peridot. I just…I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t feel like myself anymore, and I don’t like it.”

“You know, we felt that way too,” Lapis said as she gently rocked Peridot from side to side. “When Steven convinced me to give Earth a chance, I spent a long time not knowing what to do. I wasn’t terraforming anything, or running from Jasper or the Crystal Gems anymore. I felt like I could do anything I wanted, but I didn’t know how to want to do anything new or different. All of the choices and experiences around me just kind of overloaded me. Both of us, actually,” she added, and nodded down to the Gem in her arms. 

“I had at least one recorded psychotic break,” Peridot added as she mopped at her face and replaced her visor. “Literally recorded, actually. Steven gave me a playback audio device to help me organize my thoughts until I was able to cope with a directive-less existence. I tried giving it to Lapis to do the same, but she…declined.”

Her cheeks coloring at the memory, Lapis said, “Well, not everything works the same for everybody, right? Being around Steven and Peridot, and then later around you and Jade, helped me a lot. The books you’ve lent me helped me understand this planet a lot better.”

“But it’s not the same,” Connie protested weakly. “I’m a human. I’ve always lived on Earth.”

Regaining some of her composure, Peridot managed an imperious little laugh. “You’ve just reversed the order, you clod,” she said, pushing affection into the last word. “We were created as Gems and then thrust into the chaos of Earth. You started here, and then you became a Gem. The extreme shift in our nominal mindsets is still relatively equivalent.”

“Change is hard,” Lapis said, and nodded in agreement. “Like, really, really hard. It’s okay to need some help dealing with it. At least, I hope it’s okay, ‘cause I still need help too.”

Connie stared down at the half a Protes bar in her hand, no longer hungry. Their words sounded sensible enough. Even Steven himself, Peridot’s baseline for acceptable human norms, had leaned on Connie when he’d been feeling low. And Connie was glad he did. She wanted him to. So why didn’t it feel fair for her to do the same thing?

Because Steven never broke a promise and made someone else sacrifice themself for him, the little voice inside of her said. His gemstone was a gift of love. You stole yours.

She hesitated, wondering if she should speak the thoughts aloud. Then a ringing chime and a flash of light from outside made her jolt off her seat in a swell of panic. Her heart thundered in her ears, and a cold sweat beaded on her forehead, at the mere thought of Steven and the other Gems arriving at the farm in search of her.

Lapis seemed to sense her apprehension, and reached out to grasp Connie’s limp hand. “It’s okay,” she said, and gave Connie’s hand a squeeze. “You don’t have to do it alone.”

“Right,” Peridot agreed, pulling herself upright with resolve. “You’ll apologize to Steven, and we’ll all discuss how to improve your mental state in a collaborative, supportive manner. I can design a wellness chart! …if you think it’ll help, that is,” she added, and reined her excitement back sheepishly.

Steeling herself with a deep breath, Connie likewise straightened herself. It felt a little childish to keep holding Lapis’s hand, but she couldn’t bring herself to release her grasp. A tremendous wave of gratefulness washed through her when she squeezed Lapis’s hand and felt the Gem squeeze back again. Offering up a pallid smile, Connie said, “Right. Let’s go.”

As the three of them stepped out into the barnyard, hopeful and anxious to relieve the Crystal Gems of their fruitless search, they stopped short at the doors. Connie felt her stomach plummet and her hand slip numbly from Lapis’s as she stared in horror at the warp pad.

There, crowded atop the crystal platform, stood five Gems. Milky Quartz loomed in the back with an expression of uncertainty twisting in her thick features. Flint and Polarite stood near the front, nudging and jostling as the two slender Gems jockeyed for elbow room. The diminutive Zircon stood at the front, and her nervousness turned to cautious glee as she looked about and saw only a handful of defenders.

And there, at the center, stood Pyrite. The hilt of a familiar pink sword hovered behind her shoulder, tied in place by a spare piece of cabling that crossed the gladiator’s purple and red flame-patterned leotard. A wicked grin of recognition spread across Pyrite’s face as her mirrored visor turned across the yard to spy Connie.

“Let’s make this quick,” Pyrite said.

Chapter Text

Connie’s heart leapt into her throat at the sight of Shard’s full forces mustering on the warp pad of the farm. As she stared at the five deadly Gems framed against the open sky, with the colors of sunset painting them like fire, she felt her body and brain disconnect. Muscle memory screamed at her to draw her sword, to summon a hurricane, and obliterate the enemies who had come knocking on their doorstep. But her mind blue-screened, too caught between the depths of misery that she’d been trying to crawl free from, and the shock of seeing such an overwhelming force arrive without warning.

Luckily, Peridot was ready to spur them all into action. The little engineer took one look at the crowded warp pad and screamed, “Red Alert!”

For a few beats, nothing happened. Lapis and Connie were both frozen with the same uncertainty, and Shard’s goons looked confused at the lack of anything to come out of Peridot’s cry.

Looking around, Peridot’s panicked face crumbled into an expression of annoyance. “For real, this time!” she added hotly.

That additional context spurred the farm’s defenses into action. From around the sides of the barn, Peridot’s five garbage can drones, her mighty campers, charged forward in a rumble of caterpillar treads. Their lids cracked open to reveal forked prongs that crackled with yellow electrical energies.

With her armada deployed, Peridot bent herself low and threw her arms outstretched behind her as if to reach through the open barn doors. “Be careful of the field. It’s active now,” she warned Lapis and Connie.

Flint swaggered off the warp pad with flames blossoming in her upraised palms. “Ha! Active with what?” she jeered.

Two steps from the pad, the barren ground beneath Flint exploded with an eruption of translucent yellow goo. An instant later, the goo hardened, encasing the cocky Quartz in a golden, globby vertical lump of gloop. The substance, a corn-based solution engineered by Peridot, had snared Flint within its grasp so that only her widened eyes could flick back and forth from inside the glass prison. That same substance waited underground all throughout the yard in dozens of other mines just like the one Flint had triggered.

“A minefield?” exclaimed Polarite. The prim scientist scratched at the edge of the pyramidal gemstone on her forehead with a floating finger. “How…indiscriminate.” 

Pyrite blew an impatient breath through her nose. “Flint, quit mucking around,” she snapped at the statuesque firebrand. 

Then, with hardly a flex, Pyrite leapt from the pad and sailed through the air. A single bound brought the gladiator past the edge of the minefield to land only a few yards from where Connie, Lapis, and the poised Peridot stood. Milky swung her mismatched arms and made a similar leap, though she landed in a stumble and hurried to right herself and loom behind Pyrite’s imposing visage.

Seeing the enemy Gems’ so easily circumvent their defenses put Connie on her back foot. She swept her sailcloth sword from Jade’s stone and leveled it at the pair. Scowling at the hulking white Gem, she said, “So I guess we’re not friends after all, huh, ‘Not-Milky?’”

Milky had at least enough wherewithal to look abashed. “I, um, don’t know what you’re talking about,” she insisted, tapping her fingers together in an absentminded gesture. “I’m Milky, not Not-Milky. She’s a human, and I’m a Gem.”

Pyrite’s mirrored visor turned back toward Milky in a momentary frown. But the gladiator quickly shook off her confusion, and said, “I have no idea what that’s all about, and I don’t want to know. Just give us your tech, and we’ll only hurt you a little bit.”

As Pyrite stepped forward, Lapis faltered back a step. Her voice shook as she tried to snap back, “W-We’re not afraid of you!”

“Are you sure?” Pyrite asked, bemused. Her visor tilted toward Peridot, who was still bent low with her arms thrown behind her. “The little one there is trembling.”

“I’m not trembling,” Peridot growled. “I’m focusing.”

“On what?” sneered Pyrite.

Something inside of the open barn rang with a metallic clank! Peridot’s frown curled into a sneer to mirror Pyrite’s as she said, “This.”

A blur of polished metal hurled itself through the barn doors, drawn to Peridot by the Gem’s ferrokinetic prowess. As Connie saw it fly by her, she mistook it for a large ball of metal plating. But the shape revealed itself as it swung open on a hidden hinge and slammed into Peridot, swinging up under her legs to snap closed around her hips. As the metal latches clanged into place, Peridot rested her fists on the large metal briefs she’d summoned from her workshop, which looked too much like a stainless steel diaper to be impressive on its own.

For an instant, no one moved. Then Pyrite and Milky dissolved into stifled giggles, exchanging a look with each other that wilted Peridot’s confidence. “That’s certainly a choice,” Pyrite said, fighting and failing to keep her stern demeanor intact.

“Is that supposed to make your butt kick-proof?” Milky added, and brayed a loud, long laugh at the little engineer.

Peridot’s cheeks colored, and she reached back for the barn again. “I’ll admit, that wouldn’t have been the first piece I picked…”

“Oh, I needed a laugh today,” Pyrite sighed and wiped tears from the bottom rim of her visor. Then she casually reached under the black cape draped across one shoulder and drew her vicious double-headed axe in a flash from her hidden gemstone. “Okay. Let’s shatter ‘em, Milky.”

Connie braced herself to try and block Pyrite’s axe, knowing full well that she wasn’t strong enough to take the gladiator’s blow on her own. If it were only her at risk, Connie would have started running long before the taunting and mockery had begun. But with Lapis frozen in uncertainty beside her, and Peridot donning some weird metal pants, it left only her to protect all three of them. 

But even as she lifted her sword, she saw another flash of motion at the corner of her vision, and ducked as a second piece of heavy steel flew out of the barn. Her moment’s distraction left her completely open to Pyrite’s axe, which swung down with inhuman speed to cut her in half.

The metal blur latched around Peridot’s arm as she brought it forward to catch Pyrite’s axe. A -clap of thunder rang as the construct weapon stopped dead in mid-swing, caught between the fingers of a steel arm now belonging to Peridot. The armored limb dwarfed Peridot’s other arm, extending far beyond her normal reach, and though it trembled with the effort to hold back Pyrite’s axe, it wouldn’t budge no matter how hard the gladiator pushed.

With a grunt of surprise, Pyrite shifted her weight to kick Peridot bodily. If she couldn’t move the arm, Pyrite seemed content to move the rest of the Gem attached to the arm. But a racket of more steel came tumbling out through the barn doors and crashed into Peridot to foil the gladiator’s plans.

Peridot hopped into a set of long metal legs that wrapped around her own stubby stumps, hooking into the hips of her contraption seamlessly. Bracing her weight forward, she caught Pyrite’s kick against her metal shin, which bent and squeaked at the raucous force, but held firm.

A second metal arm swallowed Peridot’s other free limb. A hinged chestplate swung up and over, snapping closed around the arms and hips to join the rest. And last, a triangular metal headpiece dropped and locked into place at the base of her neck. The geometric helmet covered everything but her eyes, which glared back at Pyrite’s shocked expression from behind their yellow visor.

Pyrite tried to yank her axe back. It took several tugs before Peridot let the blade slip from her metal grasp. Staggering backwards, Pyrite snarled, “What kind of crazy limb enhancers are those?”

With a moment of breathing room to take it in, Connie gaped in wonder at Peridot’s latest invention. The metal frame surrounding the little Gem was simple, but highly polished, and more intricate than it appeared at first glance. Fully articulated fingers wiggled at the ends of the layered gauntlets. As Peridot shifted, barely a hiss of metal-on-metal sounded at the motion, belying the perfection of each joint in the device’s construction. Obviously her collaboration with Bismuth had yielded tremendous results.

Her voice reverberated within her helmet as Peridot retorted, “It isn’t limb enhancement. It’s armor.”

And she stepped forward, plunging her fist into Pyrite’s stomach. The huge gladiator folded in half as she flew off the end of Peridot’s arm, tumbling backwards into a collapsed heap a dozen yards away.

For a moment, Peridot hung frozen, and Connie feared for half a second that the armor had somehow locked up around the engineer. But then Peridot’s metal arms swung high with fists upraised, and she screamed tinnily, “I just punched the Impossible Pyrite! Oh, my stars! If only the gals in the Kindergarten could see me now!”

Clambering to her feet, Pyrite collected her axe. One of the tin can campers rolled at her, attempting to capitalize on their maker’s success, but a flick of Pyrite’s weapon cleaved the camper in half. Its lid tumbled away, its dissipation tines sputtering in impotence, as the crumpled pieces of the drone collapsed around its treads.

Peridot’s thick metal hands grasped at the sides of her helmet in a gesture of despair. “Pierre, no!” she cried. Looking to her remaining campers encircling their corner of the battlefield, she shouted, “Go contain the other aggressors! Protect our infrastructure!”

As the rolling garbage cans trundled across the minefield, zig-zagging between the buried defenses, Pyrite shot a glare at her hesitant lumbering companion. “Milky? A little help?” Pyrite snapped.

“Huh? Oh, yeah!” Milky shook herself out of her lingering surprise at Peridot’s transformation. The enormous Quartz summoned her hammerfist weapon and lifted her tree-trunk arm high to crush Peridot like an empty tin can. 

A sideways waterfall belted into Milky, and fifty tons of pressurized water slammed her into the metal-plated wall of the barn, pinning her there. Lapis stood beside the roiling column of water that stretched out from the barnyard pond. “Go. Away,” she growled.

Sighing impatiently, Pyrite looked toward the warp pad. “Anybody else? Seriously?”

“I have my own concerns, thank you. Keep up the good work over there,” Polarite said offhandedly, waving away the gladiator’s consternation while she examined the minefield surrounding the warp pad where she and Zircon still stood. The little fleet of campers whirred at them both in a beeline. But as her study of the barnyard tipped toward Peridot’s satellite command center at the far edge of the grass, the studious Gem’s expression brightened. “Aha! Methinks there won’t be any explosives near delicate equipment. Unless, of course, this bolt-cranker is as stupid as I fear she is.”

Polarite’s labcoat flared out as her legs transformed from the shin-down, opening intake valves and folding her pointed feet out and around into circular backblast guards. With a hiss, the reconfigured feet erupted with little jets of blue flame that left blackened circles on the pale crystal of the warp pad as she ascended into the air.

Zircon yelped and leapt at the last second, wrapping her arms and legs awkwardly around Pyrite’s torso to cling to the scientist. Together, they rode Polarite’s jet feet in a long, slow arc that carried the pair over the minefield. The grass curled into twin craters of ash as Polarite touched down at Peridot’s command center and regarded the cobbled device with obvious skepticism.

As Milky struggled against the pseudopod of water pinning her to the barn wall, and Pyrite squared up against the three of them alone, Connie felt her skin prickle with heat in the direction of the pad, though it stood empty now. A glance to one side revealed the solidified geyser of gloop expanding like a balloon. The core of the gloop turned black, obscuring the Gem trapped inside of it, while the rest of the surging gloop darkened into amber as the black core spread outward.

Flames burst as the bubble of gloop popped, revealing a sticky and enraged Flint at the charcoal center of the mine’s remains. The lingering globs of gloop evaporated steamily off her sizzling hot form. “Right,” she snarled, “whose jankin’ fault is—”

As she took a reflexive step toward the trio of barnyard defenders, another mine bamphed underfoot, and she became trapped in a new shell of the hardened golden material. An unfathomable rage burned in her eyes, the only part of her still able to move, as she began to burn her way out of her second imprisonment. 

Connie’s eyes flicked back from the minefield toward the battle in front of her a second too late. In that moment of distraction, Pyrite was already hurtling toward her, axe raised, lips curled in a vicious grin. Reflexively, Connie reached with her half-hollow to squeeze the air and blast her nemesis away with a hasty air grenade.

Only, her half-hollow didn’t respond. The emptiness inside of her, once a concrete absence that laid bare where Jade had once been inside of her, had become a formless, ragged thing floating insubstantially in her thoughts. When she tried to use it to grasp at the winds, she could no longer visualize the constructs she’d used to channel air pressure into mighty gusts or invisible explosions. Instead, all she could see in her mind’s eye was the memory of Steven’s tear-streaked features staring back at her through the shock of betrayal.

She lifted her sword, already knowing she would be too slow to stop Pyrite’s axe. 

Peridot stepped in instead. Though the engineer’s prodigious limbs now made her taller than Connie, she too was dwarfed by the fierce gladiator that attacked them both. Yet as Peridot swung, she batted aside Pyrite’s lethal axe as though it were a toy, backhanding it from Connie with a sweep of her thick gauntlets.

The metal-clad Gem pirouetted, swinging her foot up in a clumsy kick. Peridot had no form, no grace, no technique in her movements, but the power behind her silvery body made up for it. Her foot connected with Pyrite’s hip much harder than Shard’s gladiator had expected, and Pyrite was flung backwards into Peridot’s small lawn tractor. The diminutive vehicle crumpled in a shriek of rending metal and shattering plastic, and wrapped around the big Gem as it tilted and tipped over, stranding Pyrite on her back in an entanglement of scrap.

“No time for introspection, Connie Jade!” Peridot cried tinnily, and clumsily lowered her leg. “We need to fight!!”

A spray of water suddenly erupted from where Milky hung pinned to the side of the barn. The giant Quartz gathered herself into a ball, then snapped her arms and legs out in a fierce sweep that shattered the living tendril of water into a misty spray. Lapis hurried to regather the tendril, but Milky rolled herself into a lopsided spin-dash that careened forward, chasing the delicate blue Gem into the sky lest she be bowled under the white blur. Gaining momentum, the spin-dashing Milky made a wide turn and shot toward Peridot and Connie with relentless speed.

Connie watched the big Quartz’s angle of attack and felt a thrill of possibility as something devious entered her thoughts. Shuffling toward the oncoming blur, she made herself the obvious target between herself and Peridot. A great, white, barrelling boulder, the Quartz loomed at Connie, all but crushing her, when Connie moved.

Sweeping low, Connie pulled herself out of Milky’s path at the last moment. The motion put momentum behind her sword, which she thrust backwards under one arm with all of the Gem strength she could muster. The sword tip pounded against a whirling body as hard as any brick wall. She had little hope that the stab could poof Milky outright. But that had never been her intention.

The force of Connie’s blow threw the spin-dashing Milky off course toward the open barnyard, where her flinty counterpart was currently burning herself out of her second gloop imprisonment. Unable to stop her momentum, Milky bounced into the minefield at full speed, wailing in alarm.

As her own gloop bubble burst again, Flint surged her flames to burn away the sticky remnants on her form. “Okay, now I’m really—!”

The skinny gray Gem was cut off mid-threat as a whirling ball of Milky Quartz slammed into her, pounding them both into the ground. Two, three, four gloop mines burst in sequence as the pair of Gems tumbled across the barnyard, adding more and more crystalized gloop to their tangle, until at last they came to rest in a misshapen lump of the translucent corn-glass the size of a passenger van. Milky’s expression had frozen in a look of chagrin, and Flint’s, a blackening expression of apoplectic fury aimed at her bumbling friend.

As Polarite lifted her arm, a translucent holographic screen manifested above her white sleeve. She stared through the screen at the cobbled mainframe, and frowned as Peridot’s monitors collectively turned red.

Behind her, the redirected battalion of campers raced at her, following the invisible grid of the minefield. Their garbage can lids shifted up, and four gleaming dissipator tines emerged, crackling with energy meant to disassemble the photomatter that comprised the two enemy Gems.

Slapping at Polarite’s back, Zircon watched the oncoming drones with growing panic. “Um! Um!” she stammered helplessly.

Polarite cast half a glance backwards and sighed. One of the studious yellow Gem’s arms swung around, and the sleeve of her coat bulged as her forearm shifted into an elongated cannon. The floating fingers of her hand combined into a disconnected aperture, and white hot plasma belched forth from the mechamorphed limb.

The camper in the middle took the blast head on, and exploded. Red-hot shrapnel fratricided into the other campers at either side, shredding through their steel can bodies and tearing them apart. The final lagging camper caught the edge of the blast and veered wildly off-target, rolling to a stop as one side of its caterpillar treads was choked with shrapnel and tore itself apart. Smoke and fire belched through the holes in the camper’s cylindrical body as it sputtered, coughed, and fell still.

“Noooo!” howled Peridot. “You’ll pay for that, you miserable clod! I’ll— Hey! Quit that!”

The armored engineer’s horror gave way to outrage as the red monitors on her command center gave way to flickering pages of gem glyphs, presumably the catalog of Peridot’s data. Polarite jabbed idly at her own screen with a long, floating finger, isolating a string of glyphs. “Hmm… No. No. No. Worthless. No,” she muttered.

“Faster, please!” Zircon whined. Her hand rose to her owlish glasses, and with a touch, a backwards chronometer glowed briefly in the lenses. “If we aren’t there when she—”

“Kindly micromanage your brutes in lieu of me, thank you,” Polarite snapped without turning away from her digital search. “These files are organized so poorly that I’d swear a Ruby cataloged them. This will take a few chrons.”

”It won’t take any time at all, you clo—“

A flash of gold behind the ranting engineer sent a surge of panic through Connie. Though her attention was split in too many directions across the chaotic battlefield, Connie’s hands moved faster than her thoughts, hooking under the armpits of Peridot’s armor and hauling the Gem backwards. Even with a Jade’s strength, her arms screamed as she yanked Peridot out of the way of Pyrite’s axe. She could feel the air split along the axe’s edge as she and Peridot stumbled and collapsed into a tangle of flesh and metal limbs.

Pyrite darted forward, lifting her axe to cleave the pair of them into uneven halves, when a tendril of water as thick as a telephone pole batted the gladiator off her feet. Connie used the extra second of breathing room to extricate herself from Peridot and spring to her feet with her sword at the ready.

Lapis landed behind Connie, her wings spread wide in an aggressive stance. The tendril of water extending from the pond flickered obediently at Lapis’s gesture, sweeping under Peridot to lift her bodily and deposit her onto her thick steel boots.

Shambling upright, Pyrite wiped the spattered condensation from her mouth and grinned at the farm’s three defenders. “Three Crystal Gems against Homeworld’s best? You’re gonna need more than that little pond, dirt-pusher,” she growled.

“I’m not a Crystal Gem,” Lapis retorted. Her eyes glimmered reflectively, and she added, “and I brought plenty of water.”

The surface of the pond leapt straight up into a column of water that towered over the barn. Millions of gallons of crystal clear water glimmered as it grew taller, taller. When it seemed to reach the top of the sky, it began to spread, unfurling into a pair of enormous wings. Once, the farm’s lonely little pond had been nothing more than a little pool made from the capped mouth of a long-abandoned drill tunnel to the center of the Earth. 

After Milky’s and Flint’s first visit to the farm, Lapis and Peridot had worked together to expand the pond underground. Peridot’s machines had dug a hidden expanse beneath the barnyard…

…and Lapis had borrowed a lake to fill it.

As the shadow of the wings blanketed the farm and fields, Pyrite’s grin widened. Her mirrored visor tilted down, and she spun her axe in a lazy arc. “Now we’re talkin’,” she purred.

Connie clenched her sword’s hilt until her knuckles creaked. Baring her teeth, she leapt forward, beginning the fray.

Pyrite batted aside her sword and whirled, almost bisecting Connie at the waist with a lazy circle of her axe. Then the golden gladiator danced backwards, neatly avoiding a rain of water tendrils that pounded the dirt where she’d stood. The thicket of tentacular water bowed and burst into a rainbow spray as Pyrite swept through them, blasting them apart, only to catch a blow from Peridot’s plated gauntlets in the back. 

As the winged water tower looming over them split into hundreds of raining pseudopods, Connie saw the glaring flaw in their defense. She wheeled backwards, hooking a hand into the collar of Peridot’s armor to drag her along, as they both stumbled just out from under a wall of solid water that crushed the ground around Pyrite.

For all their powers, Peridot and Lapis didn’t know how to fight. Worse, they had never learned to fight as a team. Connie and Steven had both spent many hours training to follow Pearl’s lead to battle as a united front. She knew well how to follow her mentor’s lead. 

But she didn’t know how to lead, or how to get the others to follow without simply shouting commands…which Pyrite would hear and anticipate anyway.

The wall of water exploded, and Pyrite burst through, her axe swinging for Peridot’s neck. A growing shadow gathered beneath them both, as Lapis’s next water hammer descended to dispense indiscriminate destruction onto Pyrite and anyone near her.

With no time to be gentle, Connie jumped, planted a foot on Peridot’s hip, and leapt off the staggering engineer to push them both out of the path of Pyrite’s axe. Her sailcloth sword cut under the gladiator’s arm as Connie flew past. She felt the pulverizing water brush past her toes as she hurtled out from under its edge and tumbled onto the quaking ground.

Hovering above, Lapis clapped her hands over her mouth. “Ohmygosh, sorry!” she called down as Connie rolled back to her feet.

The thick column of water lost cohesion and rushed across the ground, pouring over Pyrite’s back as she pushed herself up from the mud. A murderous snarl curled in her lips as she turned her mirrored visor up to the sky. She crouched, then launched herself upward, hurtling toward Lapis at unthinkable speed.

Connie was already jumping, trying to intercept Pyrite, when she felt a ton of metal slam into her from the side. Somewhere amidst the pain of the blow, she realized that Peridot had taken the same reaction, and they had collided in midair. Connie mercifully landed on top as the two of them slammed back into the ground in a tangle of limbs.

Lapis tried to bat Pyrite aside with a wave of water. But Pyrite burst through it, scoffing at the demands of physics and inertia with a slice of her axe. She collided with Lapis, wrapping the slender Gem into a fierce bear hug that bore both of them to the ground on the other side of the farm. Rows of corn folded and snapped beneath them as Pyrite drove Lapis through a deep furrow in the earth, coming to rest with her knee pressed down on Lapis’s chest at the bottom of an oblong crater.

Connie began to run, sprinting at the pair. All tactics and forethought evaporated from her mind as her desperation to save her friend overcame all of her training.

Peridot was somehow faster, clanking ahead. Connie couldn’t figure out why, until the ironclad engineer forewent all appearances, and took to the air in silent flight. She soared over the minefield with her fists extended, hurtling like a living missile at Pyrite. “I’m coming, Lapis!” she bellowed.

That’s when Connie realized the true genius of Peridot’s armor. It didn’t just make her taller and tougher. It gave her a conduit to channel her ferrokinesis. Peridot had learned to puppet herself inside of the armor, which was now as strong and powerful as Peridot’s own command over metal.

Polarite looked up from her search through Peridot’s database and frowned in annoyance at Peridot’s soaring. “Really. Must I do everything?” she groaned, and converted her free hand into a floating horseshoe magnet.

A wave of Polarite’s transformed tool shook the barnyard. Connie stumbled to a halt, fearful that the enemy Gem had some unknown power over the ground beneath them. Then she saw a grid of rising mounds in the bare dirt surrounding the warp pad, and she felt her stomach plummet.

Using her own mastery of magnetics, Polarite commanded the farm’s entire minefield to leap up from the earth. The small, rounded, cobbled weapons tumbled up into the air. Then, at another gesture from Polarite, the mines moved, converging as one at Peridot.

Peridot’s focus remained on Lapis and Pyrite as she hurtled through the air. But her hand flicked out in an irritated gesture, and the mines careening toward her suddenly swerved ninety degrees in a hard right turn.

“Hold still, Milky!” Flint snarled, burning away the last of the gloop that entombed them. Milky’s wiggling made it difficult to keep her flames focused, as the bigger Quartz would shake their glassy amber prison with even the smallest movement. But eventually, the lingering gunk whispered into smoke beneath them, and they stretched free.

“Now,” Flint said, turning an eye back toward the battle, “where’s the janker who—”

A sideways rainfall of mines poured into Flint and Milky. Countless pops and pfffss resounded, covering their screams of surprise as a comet of hardened gloop conglomerated from the explosions. In an instant, a grand gloop mound over twenty feet high emerged to loom over the barnyard. Deep inside its shadowy recesses, the silhouettes of two unlucky Quartzes seethed.

“GET OFF OF HER!” Peridot roared, and flew into Pyrite like a steel javelin.

Pyrite didn’t even look back. She merely swept her arm out, batting Peridot aside as though the engineer weren’t even there.

Peridot flew backwards through the air, tumbling and screaming, and smashed through her own command center. The secondhand electronics smashed under her, collapsing inward as she cut the haphazard rig of computers in half. She came out the other side in a dizzy heap, pawing at the ground to figure out which way was up.

Polarite shielded her face from the spray of sparks and shrapnel that erupted from the command center at Peridot’s landing. Her holographic screen went blue with a message of floating white Gem glyphs, cut off from Peridot’s database. “Blast! Look what you’ve done, you grandstanding oaf!” Polarite hurled at Pyrite.

“Go cry into a beaker,” Pyrite snarled back at her. Then she reached down, grabbed a dazed Lapis by the leg, and swung. Up and over, Laps went high in an arc and slammed into the ground as Pyrite beat the earth with her, wielding her by the ankle as though she were a cudgel. Wham! A cloud of dust and broken corn stalks leapt up around Lapis as her body cratered the ground. Wham! The force of the blow shook the farmyard. Wham!

“Let go of her!” Connie screamed. She raised her sword in a charge, but stopped as a translucent shadow wavered up and around her, blotting out the sun. She looked up in horror to see Lapis’s tower of water, her vertical lake, losing its cohesion. A thousand tons of water toppled, consuming the sky in a tsunami that descended upon the farm.

Connie tried to summon a gale to counter the water crashing down upon her, but the raggedy half-hollow inside of her refused to produce so much as a gasp. Jade’s Gemstone had abandoned her, leaving her to a watery fate.

By some miracle, perhaps an echo of Lapis’s control, the watery column collapsed in on itself. Much of the water spilled back into its underground reservoir. But plenty still rushed into the ground, spilling into a circular wave that rushed out from the too-small pond at the epicenter. The wall of water smashed into Connie, tossing her end over end through the cold, suffocating grip of a mad ocean current, and then slamming her into the ground.

She rose, coughing, pushing at the mud beneath her, and swept a curtain of wet hair out of her eyes. To her horror, Shard’s forces had weathered the water bomb far better than she. Milky and Flint stood free of their confinement, as the water-soluble gloop had eroded into an amber slurry. Steam wafted off of Flint and hissed in her footprints as she dried herself amidst shimmering heat, and glared hatefully back at Connie.

“Well, this is a total loss,” Polarite said, and sighed at the dripping wreckage that used to be Peridot’s command center. “I suppose we’ll have to simply take the source with us instead.”

Her hands mechamorphed into magnets again, and she swept her tools toward Peridot. The armored engineer was digging herself out of the mud when an invisible force ripped her from the ground and held her aloft. 

“Hey! Let go, you clod!” Peridot howled. Her ironclad arms struggled for purchase, but then snapped to her sides. Peridot strained, snarling, seemingly pushing back with her own ferrokinetic might. But try as she did, her own armor remained standing at attention in midair, now a prison to the Gem who had designed it.

Pyrite hefted a limp and insensate Lapis, who still dangled with her foot trapped in the gladiator’s fist. “What about this one?” grunted Pyrite.

Polarite considered the slender blue Gem, and then grinned. Waving one of her magnets at the barn, she said, “Send her home.”

A matching grin split Pyrite’s face. She swung Lapis overhand and hurled the unconscious Gem across the muddy barnyard and through the open doors of the barn. Though Connie couldn’t see Lapis, the vicious sound of splintering wood emerged from inside the barn, assuring Connie that the landing had not been gentle. 

Then Polarite aimed her free magnet at the distant barn, and the whole structure began to quake. Months ago, Peridot had reinforced the barn with as much scrap metal as she could scavenge, covering its planks and shoring up its beams with riveted, rusty steel and iron. Now, that same protection groaned noisily as Polarite’s ferrokinetic grasp closed around the whole barn, which began to buckle and break inward.

The sound of rending metal and straining wood pushed Connie back to her feet. Outnumbered, exhausted, she looked for her sword in vain. The weapon had been swept away from her by the wave of crashing water, and must have dissipated without her focus. Reaching for her throat, she willed another hilt to emerge from Jade’s gemstone. But the stone remained dark, unwilling to heed her call anymore.

Seeing the weaponless foe only made Pyrite’s smile sharper. Her mirrored visor fell upon Connie as she hefted her axe and started forward to finish their battle. “Got one last round left in you, Jade?” the gladiator taunted.

Sputtering protest erupted from the mud as Zircon extricated herself. “No! No more delays! Her ship may have landed already!” she cried.

For half a second, Pyrite hesitated, still looking eager to finish what she’d started months ago at Ascension. But Zircon’s words seemed to make up her mind for her. With a wave, she dissipated her axe, and then stomped through the mud and up to the floating Peridot. “Fine,” she said.

“Connie Jade!” Peridot cried tinnily through her magnetic imprisonment. “Save La—!”

Pyrite grasped Peridot’s armor bodily, wrapping her giant hands around the engineer’s torso. Then she gripped and twisted. 

Metal shrieked as the armor collapsed like an empty soda can. Jets of green smoke billowed out of the crumpling joints and belched from the visor before the helmet thumped emptily into the mud. A small, green, triangular stone plopped next to it, one corner sinking into the wet earth as it came to rest.

Connie hesitated. If she had her winds, she could have yanked the stone out of the ground and blown it back into her hands. 

Only, they weren’t her winds. They were Jade’s. And they remained silent as Pyrite bent and gingerly plucked Peridot’s stone from the mud.

Desperately, Connie sprinted for the barn, praying that she could honor Peridot’s last words. The old structure’s roof caved inward, held together more by Peridot’s handiwork than its original construction now. Dust and splinters clouded the barn’s interior as its walls crumpled inward. She didn’t even hesitate as she plunged into the prickly cloud, struggling over collapsed beams and through broken metal sheets toward the rear of the building.

“Pack it in, you two,” Pyrite shot at the muddy Milky and Flint, who slogged over to meet her on the warp pad. “We’re done here.”

Polarite maintained her magnetic grip on the barn as she hovered on jet-feet to join them. “And not a moment too soon,” she said. With one final burst of effort, she wrenched the barn past its point of no return, and then relaxed her tools back into hands. “There now. All set?”

“Wait!” The plaintive cry rose up from Zircon. The administrator, normally so spick and span, had one foot lodged deep in the mud, which sucked her down as she twisted and strained to free herself.

“Quit lagging about, already!” Flint grumbled, baking the mud on her into a fine shell she could brush away.

“Ugh. Just go,” Polarite said. Then called out to Zircon, “Warp back to the Celerity Forge when you’re done playing around.”

As a white warp tunnel flashed, whisking the four enemy Gems into the sky without their lagging ally.  “Hang on!” Zircon said, fumbling with her stuck leg. “I’ve almost—hurk!”

The officious pink Gem stiffened. Veins of yellow crisscrossed her body, which began to come apart. A pink cloud erupted where Zircon had stood, and her boxy gemstone dropped into the mud. 

Behind her, the lone surviving camper, who had dragged itself on a single caterpillar tread over to the ruins of the command center, retracted its dissipator. “Ca-Ca-Ca-Campe Diem!” the resilient little garbage can cried. Then the sputtering light faded from the breaches and tears in its metal skin, and it sagged into the mud, vomiting smoke as its final act of defiance.

Coughing, Connie turned her full attention back to the search inside of the collapsing barn. Every breath felt like sandpaper in her lungs, and she could hardly see past the length of her own arm as she fumbled through strewn debris and shattered worktables. “Lapis!” she cried. “Lapis, where are you?”

Amidst the groaning of the collapsing barn, Connie heard a pained grunt underfoot. She squinted down through stinging tears and saw a flash of blue under her sole. Kneeling down, she felt around until her hands struck the smooth fabric of Lapis’s dress under a layer of splinters and sawdust. 

She found Lapis’s wrist and pulled, hoping to work back toward the shrinking daylight at the front of the barn. But Lapis wouldn’t budge. Swiping at her eyes, Connie ran her hands across the insensate Gem, and then felt her heart drop in realization as her fingers discovered the shape of an enormous beam laying across Lapis’s chest. Even with Gem strength, Connie wasn’t certain that she could lift the immense length of wood. If she’d had a lever, and could improvise some kind of fulcrum, then perhaps…

The roof above them howled. Daylight vanished into darkness as the walls gave way, crumbling under the weight of the scrap metal roof.

As Connie saw the ceiling descend upon them, she closed her eyes and draped herself over Lapis, futilely shielding the Gem with her own body. Both of them would be squished, shattered, and crushed under the weight of all that metal debris.

Please, Connie begged Jade’s gemstone, reaching out into the places where she used to feel her passenger, her friend. I know you don’t care about me, but please…

With one last shriek, the final support gave way.

Please don’t let Lapis die! Connie shouted into her half-hollow.

The roof collapsed, and the world went black.

Chapter Text

Connie awoke in darkness. For an instant, she panicked, thinking that something was wrong with her eyes. But aside from the splinters and flinders caking her skin, she couldn’t feel any injury in her body. Her eardrums throbbed with the memory of some great pressure, but otherwise, she was whole. 

As she continued to feel around, her hands found something soft and warm beside her. A gentle exploration of the shape revealed a head, then shoulders, and between those, a teardrop stone. Lapis.

Where were they? What happened to them?

It wasn’t until her wandering touch found a barrier of sharp, haphazard edges and angles that Connie dredged the memories up from her aching head. She remembered running for Lapis, hoping to somehow save her from the barn being torn down upon itself by Polarite’s ferrokinesis. There had barely been time to reach the barn, let alone any hope of dragging Lapis clear of the collapsing roof.

Rising cautiously to her knees, Connie felt the top of her head brushing against the shape of their would-be tomb. A rough hemisphere of space, barely three feet high and less than a body length wide, had kept them from being crushed under the weight of the armored barn’s wreckage. The beam pinning Lapis to the floor had rolled to one side. She could feel its relatively smooth face amidst the rest of the debris, several feet from where it had been.

The floorboards beneath them felt dry, and the insensate Gem showed no signs of stirring. It couldn’t have been Lapis’s power that had saved them. But the ragged half-hollow inside of Connie still refused to answer.

Please don’t let Lapis die!

She’d screamed the words inside of herself. Had Jade’s gemstone answered her? Had a blast of air created this pocket in the rubble that had saved her and Lapis?

It was the only explanation she could think of, yet the silence inside of her persisted. 

As the ringing in her ears faded, she heard a peal of frantic, insistent barking that came from somewhere outside of their jagged refuge. As Connie pressed herself closer to the sound, she soon heard muffled voices joining it. She recognized the voices, and began to slap at the least sharp parts of the debris wall. “Here! We’re in here!” she yelled as loudly as she could.

After nearly a minute of crying and pounding, Connie felt the debris around them began to shift. She shrank back, instinctively putting herself between the pitch black ceiling and the unconscious Lapis should their little sanctuary collapse inward on itself.

Instead, she gasped as the rubble above them tilted upward, revealing Steven, Garnet, Pearl, and Pumpkin standing above her with a twilight sky behind them. “We found them, Amethyst! Good work!” Pearl shouted.

An enormous purple excavator lifted the section of roof that had been trapping Connie and Lapis. Amethyst’s enlarged face grinned from where the excavator’s cab would have been, had it been a real vehicle. “Watch your feet!” Amethyst the Excavator cried, as her scoop shovel tipped the enormous flat of debris until it toppled in the opposite direction, landing with a crash and a plume of dust and scrap.

Amethyst shifted back down into her usual proportions, briefly illuminating the area. Connie caught a flash of Steven’s face, reading relief, concern, and uncertainty in his furrowed features before the shadows of oncoming night swallowed the details again.

Pumpkin picked her way across the rubble and hopped down, sparing a wet, webby kiss for Connie before she nuzzled at Lapis, leaving juice and pumpkin seeds all over the Gem’s face as she whined and fussed. The rumble of the roof being flipped and the worried gourd’s attention dragged Lapis back into wakefulness with a long groan. “I’m up, I’m up,” she grunted, and sat up, trying and failing to escape Pumpkin’s tongue.

Steven tried to say something, but Pearl brushed past him to kneel at Connie’s side. Her hands were steady and precise as they checked Connie for any signs of injury, while the rest of Pearl teetered at the edge of hysteria. “Thank goodness we found you! Is anything broken? Do you need first aid?” cried Pearl. “Amethyst, can you become an ambulance?”

“Yeah, I’ve been practicing. Check it!” Amethyst’s form flashed and ballooned, this time becoming a boxy van. Her mouth stretched in an approximation of a windshield, and her eyes bulged from the roof of the van in the shape of emergency lights. “Wee-Woo! Wee-Woo!” the Ame-bulance bellowed, blinking her eyes one at a time as though they were flashing in turns.

“I’m okay,” Connie assured her mentor, and rose shakily to her feet. “But…”

Steven looked around with growing worry, “Where’s—”

“Peridot!” Lapis jerked upright, sending Pumpkin tumbling. Her wings snapped out and carried her straight up until she was barely a shadow against the dark sky, where she turned in a circle, surveying the remains of the farm in a panic.

All eyes fell back to Connie, who nodded. “They all came at once,” said Connie. “They were looking for something in Peridot’s computers. And when they couldn’t find it, they poofed Peridot and took her instead.”

The Ame-bulance flashed back into Amethyst, who scoffed. “First Sapphire, and now Peridot! Is kidnapping the only thing these bozos know how to do?”

“They said they were going back to the Celerity Forge,” Connie added quickly, as the details of the battle trickled back through her headache. 

Lapis touched down beside Connie again. Her eyes were wide and wild. “Then let’s go get her!”

“We can’t,” Garnet uttered darkly, folding her arms.

“But you have to! She’s a Crystal Gem too, isn’t she?” Lapis insisted. She looked from Pearl to Garnet and back again with mounting anger. “You can’t just—”

“Dude.” Amethyst stepped up, resting a hand on Lapis’s arm. The motion earned her a dangerous look from the slender blue Gem, but Amethyst didn’t flinch. “Of course we wanna get her back.”

“But we don’t know where the Celerity Forge is,” Pearl explained. “We’ve been searching for weeks, but we’ve come up with nothing, and we’re completely out of leads.”

The mood dwindled into grim silence. And that’s when Connie heard a faint, garbled series of notes whispering in the breeze. As she recognized the soft melody, her chest stirred with new hope, and she clambored from the crater and over the remnants of the barn. Steven and the others tripped after her as she led them across the barnyard.

There, in the drying mud, near the halved remains of the command console, a little dented garbage can sat crookedly on its one remaining caterpillar tread. From its flickering innards came a soft, stuttering, chiptune rendition of the theme song to Camp Pining Hearts.

And resting in the mud next to it was a boxy pink stone.

Connie bent and collected the cool stone, pulling it from the mud, and offered it to the rest of the Gems. “We might have a new lead,” she told them.

“And now you’re back at the beach house?” 

Connie winced at the titanic worry looming in her mother’s voice through the phone. “Yeah. I’m safe now, Mom,” she said, leaning over the rail of the beach house. 

The rest of the Gems had convened inside of the house, deciding to lock Zircon’s gemstone inside of the most secure room available to them without bringing the prisoner into the temple. Now, gathered outside of the bathroom door, they waited for the enemy Gem to re-form herself so they could interrogate her.

Needing a little privacy to update her parents, Connie had escaped to the porch to make her call. Steven’s eyes had followed her on her way out the door, bright with worry, but he’d refrained from saying anything. Connie wasn’t sure what he wanted to say to her, or what she could say to him. But it would have to happen eventually.

Her mother dove into the pregnant pause Connie left hanging. “...but you’re leaving again soon to rescue Peridot?”

“Yes,” Connie said, and then added, “hopefully. The Gems are still figuring out that part.”

Another long pause hung between them as her mother processed the deluge of bad news. Connie had pointedly sidestepped the reasons she had been on the farm without Steven, but she could hear suspicions and inferences mounting on the other end of the call, waiting to tumble into an avalanche of…what? Disapproval? Reproach? 

The first rock of the avalanche tumbled as her mother finally broke the silence. “Connie, are you doing okay? You promise you’ll tell me if this gets to be too much, won’t you?” 

Her words were careful, cautious, not quite daring to suggest outright that Connie couldn’t handle things as they were, but creeping right up to that line. 

Connie drew a long, steadying breath, and started to answer that, of course, she would be fine. Bad days happened, and bad things happened, and she could handle both, because she was a responsible near-adult. Mature for her age. A warrior. A Crystal Gem.

“I’m not okay,” Connie said. 

“Oh, Connie…”

Her hand trembled as Connie listened to her own voice breaking. “I thought I could do this, and I’ve been trying really hard, but I just… It’s not working. And I said awful, terrible things to Steven. Nothing I do seems to work out, and I keep getting everything wrong, and people keep getting hurt, and…”

As she trailed off, her mother waited several seconds more. Then, gently, she said, “Connie, I think you need a break from all of this Gem business.”

“I guess…” Connie said, her voice growing thick.

“I have a double shift that starts tonight, and your father is away at a conference. But I can come on Saturday morning to pick you up.” 

There was none of the old authority in her mother’s tone. The once-fearsome matriarch spoke softly, sweetly, as if to a scared animal. It would have made Connie laugh if she didn’t feel so pathetic.

As her mother continued, talking about details, or plans, or something, Connie felt herself drifting away from her body. She lingered in this phantasmal half-gone state, unable to process the bite of the evening breeze, or the thrum of the surf, or soft murmurings happening inside the beach house, or even her mother’s voice right in her ear. She dwelt outside of herself, yet somehow still trapped by her own thoughts.

You begged them to let you stay here, Jade’s voice sneered at her. Now you can’t wait to leave, can you?  

She wanted to argue, but the truth was, she felt the stirrings of a huge relief lurking beneath her guilt. One way or another, it would all be over on Saturday. She could go back to being an ordinary kid, maybe with just a little more pyroxene in her chest than most people, and pretend like she had never truly wanted to be special.

That’s why I got stuck inside of you in the first place, Jade’s voice told her. You wanted to be a Gem, just like Steven. Just like Pearl. You wanted it so badly, it sucked me into you when Steven healed your fragile little human body. It’s your fault. And now that it’s all too hard, you’re just going to run away. Exactly what I’d expect from your species.

“—sometime after lunch…” Her mother paused, and asked, “Connie, did you hear me?”

The question yanked Connie back into her body hard enough to stagger her. “Yes. Saturday,” she echoed tonelessly.

Another pregnant pause. More worry heaped into her tone as her mother asked, “If you need me right now, I can call in to the hospital and—”

“No,” Connie said quickly, pushing the last of her confidence into her voice. “No, it’s okay. I need to stay, at least until we figure out where Peridot is.”

She could hear an argument blossom, wither, and die inside of her mother all in the space of a heartbeat. “Okay. Be safe, and be smart. And call me if you’re going to go off-planet again.”

“I will,” Connie promised.

“...I love you, Connie,” her mother said.

“...love you, Mom,” Connie croaked. Then she ended the call, not trusting her voice for one more word, lest it break her.

Stuffing her phone in her pocket, she swiped at her eyes. Then she straightened, and clenched her fists. Her worries and doubt plunged down into her ragged half-hollow, bulging and insistent, but locked away for as long as it would take to save Peridot. As she opened the screen door, she pushed everything else down deep, until only her resolve remained.

There was no more time for her own pitying self-doubt. Before she could leave, she needed to make things right again.

Inside the beach house, the interrogation had yet to begin. Pumpkin had claimed Steven’s bed as a perch, first to keep watch of the others in her unfamiliar surroundings, and then to collapse into sleep as the stress of losing her home finally overcame the little gourd. Garnet, Pearl, Amethyst, and Steven stood crowded around the closed bathroom door, listening carefully for any sounds from inside. Down on the floor, Lapis sat with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up to her chin. The spritely blue Gem looked completely drained, but she managed to offer Connie a wan smile.

“Are you okay?” Steven asked her.

His dark eyes seemed to pierce Connie’s girded half-hollow, seeing right into the truth of things. But she didn’t let it worry her. “I’m fine,” she told him, and didn’t care that he knew it was a lie. “Is she back?”

Pearl held a glass up to the door, perching her head next to it. “I thought I heard something a moment ago, but—”

The pale Gem stopped short as the sound of a flushing toilet whusshed through the door. A desperate squeaking and clattering of something hitting porcelain followed after, and then a second, shorter flush.

“There it is,” Amethyst said, nodding sagely. “They always try the toilet, but it just won’t happen. I keep telling them.”

Garnet thumped on the door with her fist. “We know you’re in there,” she announced loudly. “Come out. We just want to talk.”

Lapis rose up from the floor with danger glinting in her eyes. “Speak for yourself,” she said darkly.

“There’s no one in here!” Zircon called back through the door. A third whussh resounded alongside more porcelain clanking. “And if they were, they would have nothing to say to you. And they definitely would not be trying to escape through this baffling contraption!”

Amethyst sighed and leaned up against the door. “Okay, time to play hardball. Either you come out and talk to us, or I’ll tell you what that thing you’re stuck in is really for.”

“...you’re threatening me with knowledge?” came Zircon’s confused reply. “How is that incentive?”

“Humans eat food, right?” Amethyst began. “But the food doesn’t stay inside of them forever. So, when they’re done with it, they squeeze it out into that water bowl through their—”

The bathroom door flew open, and Zircon stood panting on the other side. A puddle of clear water seeped onto the linoleum around one of her feet. “Fine,” she said, and combed her fingers through her pink afro in a vain attempt at recapturing some dignity. “I am prepared to accept your unconditional surrender. In exchange, you will—”

Two blue wings shot between the Crystal Gems, sweeping them apart as the watery, translucent shapes grasped Zircon by the shoulders and spun her around into the opposite wall. The wood creaked and bent beneath terrible pressure as Lapis pinned the officious pink Gem to the wall with just her wings. Lapis’s hands wrapped into Zircon’s frilly shirt as she craned her face to rest mere inches on the other side of her prisoner’s owlishly round glasses.

“Where. Is. Peridot?” Lapis said.

“I-I-I-I-I wo-won’t t-tell you,” stammered Zircon.

A sharp crack echoed through the house as one of the planks behind Zircon buckled under the pressure from Lapis’s wings. “Where. Is. PERIDOT?” Lapis snarled. 

The words seemed to resonate all around them in a low, ultrasonic hum, and Connie suddenly realized that the ocean outside was literally vibrating in an echo of the blue Gem’s voice.

That resonance shook the last of the false bravado from Zircon. “I can’t tell you,” she pleaded. “And even if I could, it wouldn’t matter! Y-You can’t get there!”

Garnet rested a hand on Lapis’s shoulder. When Lapis shot a furious look back at her, the cool seer remained stoic behind her mirrored visor. Sighing in disgust, Lapis eased her grip on Zircon, letting their prisoner slide back to the floor, where she sat gasping and clutching at her arms.

“We know you’ve taken her to the Celerity Forge,” Garnet told Zircon. “Tell us why, and tell us where it is.”

Sagging in defeat, Zircon sighed. “Very well. But…may I perhaps have a proper seat? This is a bit undignified,” she said, and gestured helplessly at her own dangling form pinned to the wall.

“Oh, I think that can be arranged,” Pearl said, her features hardening with resolve.

Minutes later, Zircon sat primly on the couch with one of Steven’s pillows wedged behind her, and a cup of tea she hadn’t asked for steaming in her hands. She inhaled deeply, savoring the aroma of the Lipton bag swirling in hot water.

“What a lovely fragrance,” she marveled, and tugged at the paper tag on the teabag. Then she frowned at the browning water, and looked at Steven. “You didn’t squeeze anything from your body into this water, did you?” she asked warily.

He shook his head. “Just honey. And it came from a bottle, not me,” he said.

“That’s enough pleasantries.” Pearl growled. Then she paused, frowned, and turned. She hurried to the kitchen and came back with a ceramic saucer, which she placed under Zircon’s teacup. “Okay, now that’s enough pleasantries. Talk,” she commanded, folding her arms and looming over the prisoner.

Zircon set the tea aside and regarded the Crystal Gems with a grave expression. “You’re correct: the others would have taken your Peridot back to the Celerity Forge. The original idea was to collect any information she had on utilizing this planet’s available technology for our purposes, but I suppose Polarite thinks we need the whole Gem, and not just her notes.”

“Need her for what?” Connie demanded, drawing herself up next to Pearl and trying to look equally intimidating. “What are you building?”

“Not building.” Zircon lifted a finger, seemingly possessed with an involuntary pleasure at having the chance to correct someone. “Rebuilding!”

“The Celerity Forge is ancient. It won’t do you any good,” Garnet stated, folding her arms.

Rolling her eyes, Zircon said, “Obviously. But we needed the crystal hearts abandoned there as a power source.”

“Whoa,” Amethyst said, brightening. “P-dot guessed it exactly right!”

“And she’ll be insufferable for it,” Pearl added in a groan.

Bubbling, boiling, Lapis paced back and forth behind the coffee table with her fists clenched at her sides. “But why? Why do you need any of it? Why do you need Peridot?” she insisted.

“For the Opulence,” Zircon said, and brushed her hand in a gesture as though moving a curtain aside for a grand reveal.

A wall of blank stares answered her breathy pronouncement. “Yeeaah, we’re gonna need more than that,” Amethyst grunted.

“Obviously. What, were you all rebelling against a sense of dramatics too? I was trying to build a mood,” huffed Zircon. “Fine. The Opulence is a warship. THE warship. It was meant to carry all four Diamonds at the head of a mighty fleet that would have ended the war for Earth in one stroke.”

“All four? But Pink Diamond never…seemed aware of such a project. At least, according to our intelligence,” Pearl protested, stumbling over her words. 

Connie could see a flash of pain and confusion in her mentor’s features, and wondered just how hard it was for Pearl to still live with one foot in the past. The idea that she and Rose had failed to uncover such a monumental threat to their fragile, fledgling rebellion, must have been awful, even five thousand years later.

Zircon shook her head. “It was commissioned in secret by Yellow Diamond. She wanted to use Earth’s own resources to build the tool for its defeat. It was meant to reunite the Diamonds and reaffirm their mastery over all Gemkind!”

“So why didn’t it?” asked Amethyst.

Shrugging, Zircon leaned back into her pillow. “Nobody really knows. After your leader shattered Pink Diamond, Yellow Diamond lost all interest in the project. Her resources were diverted into some new endeavor on Earth instead.”

A knowing look passed between the four Crystal Gems. Connie possessed enough secondhand knowledge to piece the answer together for herself: The Cluster. Which, they were now learning, had only been the second of Yellow’s intended super-weapons to destroy the Earth.

Pearl’s eyes narrowed, and she leaned forward suspiciously. “You’re a Zircon. How could you possibly know all of this?”

Zircon shivered, and reached for her tea seemingly without thinking. Clutching the cup and saucer close to her chest, she said, “I didn’t. Shard knew.”

“Who is she?” Amethyst insisted, leaning forward intently.

“I-I don’t know,” Zircon said helplessly.

Garnet’s voice dropped into a dangerous octave. “Don’t lie to us,” she growled.

“I’m not, I promise!” pleaded Zircon. The steam from her cup fogged her glasses, masking her haunted eyes. “She just…appeared. Hers was the first transport from Homeworld we’d received in over a thousand cycles. It had been hectocycles since we’d even received a communique from anyone!”

“They abandoned you? But why?” Steven said.

“Resources,” said Zircon. “Or a lack thereof. Ours was the first of Yellow Diamond’s colonies, and its minerals had been exhausted even before the rebellion. Soon after, the newer colonies nearby were likewise depleted, and Colony One wasn’t even needed as a way station anymore. It was so unimportant, they send me to administrate it after Pink Diamond’s court was dissolved.”

“Ba-zing,” Amethyst deadpanned. “Self-burn.”

Zircon looked confused by the response. But she shook her head, and continued, “Then she arrived. I had never seen a Gem like her before. When she disembarked her ship, we asked her why she had come, and who had sent her. And she said…”

Her foggy eyes grew faraway, and her voice dwindled into a hush.

“I am a shard of what was, and what will be again,” whispered Zircon.

Amethyst dug into her ear with her pinkie, unimpressed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She wouldn’t tell us. But after all this time, I’ve pieced together my own theory,” Zircon murmured. Her fingers worried at the rim of her teacup. “I think she wants to restore the Diamond Authority. She’s here to resurrect Pink Diamond.”

The words lingered in the room. Connie folded her arms and suppressed a shiver, suddenly wishing for her own cup of warm tea.

“That’s impossible,” Pearl squeaked.

“I thought so too,” Zircon said. “She doesn’t let anyone know her true intentions. Not all of them. Polarite probably knows the most, if only because Shard needs her technical expertise. But once, in one of her rare good moods, when she was deep in her memories, she confessed it to me: ‘Three Diamonds will become four once more, and we will thrive again.’”

“That’s impossible!” Pearl bellowed. “Nobody can bring Pink Diamond back!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! Because—” The pale Gem whirled at the question, realizing a second too late that it was Steven who asked it. He flinched under her furious expression. Realization shattered Pearl’s anger, and she clapped her hands over her mouth in horror, silencing herself. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Garnet said. Her voice rose to fill the room, driving out Pearl’s heated cry and the chill of Zircon’s confessions. “You’re taking us to the Celerity Forge,” she told their prisoner.

 “I can’t!” Zircon insisted. “The Celerity Forge has no warp pad! We’ve kept a mobile pad there, but it has restricted access, and nobody trusted me with the code for it, thank the stars!”

“Then warp us close to it and we’ll get there on foot,” demanded Garnet.

“No, you won’t!” Zircon’s retort was half-mockery, half-panic. “It’s at the bottom of the ocean! We used a vectored gravity channel to open the water just to get our ship down there. Your measly Roaming Eye doesn’t have the capability, and the pressure at that depth will crush any Gem!”

Lapis’s head jerked up, and her eyes narrowed. “So you do know where it is,” she said dangerously.

“Yes! And you’ll never… Oh. You’re a Lapis,” Zircon trailed off in recognition as the blue Gem stepped over the coffee table to tower above their prisoner on the couch. “Sorry, I mistook you for a particularly energetic Aquamarine. So you can actually—”

“—get us down to the bottom of the ocean and rescue Peridot?” Lapis loomed, planting a hand on the couch at either side of Zircon’s nervous expression. “Yes, I can. And you’re taking us to her. Now.”

A faltering smile slashed across Zircon’s face. “Listen, I think we all got off on the wrong foot. Shard doesn’t want Earth! Not permanently, anyway. And I’m sure she’ll give back your Peridot when she’s done with her. And then we’ll leave! Surely that’s good enough for you Crystal Gems, isn’t it?”

“I’m not a…” 

Lapis bit her words short, rising from the couch and turning away in a rage. Fists clenched at her side, she paced in a circle, fuming, while the entire room watched her in silence.

Then she whirled upon Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, and snapped, “Fine! If everybody’s going to keep attacking me, and ruining my barn, and hurting my friends, all because they think I’m a Crystal Gem, then I might as well BE a Crystal Gem. Do any of you have a problem with that?”

Pearl and Garnet stared back at her, lost for words. Amethyst merely shrugged, and said, “Welcome aboard.”

As Lapis turned her fury back upon Zircon, the teacup flew out of the officious Gem’s hands. Pearl dove to catch the cup and saucer as the tea inside exploded, filling the air in a hundred tiny, floating globules. They converged on Zircon’s wrists, and jerked the prisoner to her feet in a set of watery makeshift bindings.

Digging into the pocket of her skirt, Lapis produced one of the many jailbroken smartphones Peridot had supplied her with, and shoved it into Zircon’s restrained hands. “Get the map ready. We’re going,” she said.

Rising from the floor with the cup and saucer intact, Pearl set them both aside on the coffee table, carefully sliding them away from Lapis and Zircon both. “Not to be negative, but, how? Not all of us can fly,” she said.

“We could take the spaceship,” Amethyst said excitedly.

Garnet shook her head. “Too conspicuous. They’ll detect its approach from half a planet away and be ready for us.”

“I’ll just carry you all,” Lapis snapped.

She gestured toward the kitchen, and the faucet in the sink suddenly opened with a violent spray of water. The stream snaked up and out of the basin, crossing the open air at Lapis’s command. It poured into Zircon, accumulating around the pink Gem until she was completely submerged in a bubble of levitating water.

“That might not work either,” Steven said, and regarded the floating, submerged Zircon nervously. “Some of us need to breathe.”

Pearl suddenly brightened, clapping her hands. “Oh!” she sang. “I know what we can use!”

Chapter Text

White foam crested to either side of the Gem Sloop as the plucky purple boat sped through the open ocean. Though night had long since fallen over Beach City, the sun shone high on the other side of the world, where their search for Peridot and the Celerity Forge had taken them. Any land was a distant memory behind them on their course to the horizon, with nothing but rolling waves as far as they could see in every direction.

Though the sails hung full, they had become largely ornamental. Lapis flew above the mast, arms and wings spread wide. Her power gripped the sloop’s hull in a circle of rigid water, and she dragged it through the ocean at speeds no ordinary sailboat could match. Occasionally she looked up to check their course, but the majority of her focus remained on the pink arm swinging to and fro like a compass in the crew below her.

With four Gems and two hybrids, space in the sloop was tight. Garnet sat at the back of the boat, arms folded, head tipped down in a meditative silence. Amethyst rode atop Garnet’s shoulders, content to enjoy the breeze and the rolling scenery. Pearl sat in the middle with Zircon perched on her lap. The two slender Gems vied for elbow space as Zircon stared down at Lapis’s phone, monitoring their progress across the ocean with a little too much self-importance than probably befitted a prisoner of war. 

Connie sat at the bow of the ship. With her legs crossed and her elbows resting on the rim of the hull, she watched their path cutting through the ocean, and tried to quiet her thoughts for the battle to come.

She’d girded the sides of her half-hollow, pressing around it with the rest of her flimsy self until it took shape once more. All of her old guilts and miseries filled it again, and she squeezed on top of them her new failure to save Peridot or protect the farm. With the half-hollow refilled, she could feel the air moving again, sense the push of the ocean breeze and the faster currents high above them. But she hadn’t had the courage to try and summon any winds yet.

They would come. She knew they would, because she wouldn’t give them any other choice this time. She needed to be better, if only one last time. After they rescued Peridot, Jade’s gemstone could finally rest, and lay fallow inside of her.

Behind her, Steven sat with his knees pressed up against her back, trying to make himself as small as possible in the space between her and Zircon. Connie could feel him thinking of what to say, feel how he shifted and squirmed in search of the right words, feel his breath hitching as he stopped himself before starting to speak.

After what felt like hours of abandoned tries, she felt him sag forward in defeat. “Connie,” he said plaintively, “please talk to me.”

It would have been hard to twist around and crane her neck to face him. As good an excuse as any not to look him in the eye and see his hurt expression. “What do you want me to say?” she asked, clenching her voice to keep it level.

“Anything,” he insisted. “Whatever you want to say. Please.”

Bubbles of dread tried to rise up in Connie. She stuffed them down into her half-hollow. “I’m sorry for running away. I’m sorry for what I said to you, Steven,” she said. With the true feelings behind them so tightly suppressed, Connie’s words just sounded tired.

“I know you are,” he assured her. “You didn’t mean it, you just—”

“No,” she said. Tears threatened her eyes, but she blinked them back. She didn’t get to cry, not when she had been the one to wrong him. “That’s the messed-up part, Steven. I did mean it.”

“Wh-What are you talking about?” he said, confused.

She clenched herself until her voice emerged in a flat, clinical monotone, as though she were reciting facts read from a book. “I’ve always been jealous of you. I’ve always wanted to be like you, Steven. Special. Powerful. Important. But the truth is, I’m none of those things. And pretending that I belong here only got people hurt, or worse.”

“That’s not true…” he said.

She squeezed her eyes shut as she heard tears in his voice. Her chest tightened until she thought she might break in half, but her voice remained cool. “It doesn’t matter anymore. After this mission, I’m going home. My parents only let me come here so I could learn to control Jade’s powers.”

“Connie…”

“Now I won’t accidentally hurt anyone anymore,” Connie said. “Thank you for ev…for everything you’ve done for me. But this is for the best.” She choked, barely able to finish the sentence, afraid to say more lest it break her paper-thin facade.

He didn’t reply, but she could feel him shuddering, wanting to say more. There were a million other things she wanted to say to him too. But after what she’d done, after how ungrateful she’d been, did she even have the right anymore?

“Guys,” Amethyst called uncomfortably from atop Garnet’s shoulders, “it’s a really small boat. Any chance this can wait until after we rescue Peridot?”

“No!” Steven cried, even as Connie grunted, “Yes.”

Zircon suddenly lifted the phone from her lap, and cried, “We’re here!”

Everyone lurched forward as the sloop came to a sudden stop. Connie had to mash her palms against the inside of the hull to keep herself from tumbling forward over the bow as the rest of the passengers crammed into her. As they all settled backwards, Lapis landed weightlessly at the tip of the bow, her bare toes curling around the lip as she crouched and glared at Zircon. “You’re sure?” Lapis demanded.

“If this human device of yours is accurate, yes,” Zircon huffed. She held the phone up for Lapis to see, as though the all-blue map and a set of coordinates in the corner of the screen would convince the newest Crystal Gem of their veracity. “The Celerity Forge is located here, on the ocean floor.”

“Good. Hold onto something,” Lapis announced. Then she bowed her head and threw out her arms, palms raised toward either horizon.

The ocean went still for a mile in all directions. In an instant, the gentle waves dropped into a perfectly flat surface, an enormous mirror of crystal blue with a tiny sloop sitting in its exact center. Connie’s breath hitched at the sight of the glass-smooth ocean around them. She had only seen such a thing before on the beach in her dreams.

Then the waters around the boat began to recede. Like an invisible cone being pressed into the surface of the ocean, the water peeled back in a perfect circle, rolling away to leave empty air in its wake. One thin pillar of water remained beneath the sloop to carry it gently down into the cavity being carved into the ocean.

Down, down, the watery elevator carried them into the yielding depths of the ocean. Millions of tons of water rippled out of their way, as though afraid of the ferocious blue maidenhead at the fore of the sloop. Lapis didn’t make a sound of effort as she pushed the ocean back more than a hundred yards in every direction and lowered them to the distant ocean floor.

The journey took them so far down that Connie’s ears popped twice from the sheer change of altitude. She wondered if there even was a bottom, or if Lapis would somehow carry them all the way to the Earth’s core. But at last, Connie saw the last of the water give way to sand and rocks and strange black vegetation, all desiccated in an instant after Lapis had torn the water out of them and pushed it back into the sides of the towering hollow void that loomed all around them.

Connie marveled at seeing a living cross-section of the ocean. The sky was just a tiny circle above them, and the sun’s angle couldn’t reach them so deep. Sunlight filtered through the top of the waters, making it shimmer and dance. But the closer they got to the bottom, the darker and danker it became, until the walls of their water shaft were pure black at the floor.

They found the Celerity Forge immediately, revealed when the curtain of dark water peeled away to unveil a shimmering white bubble. Some sort of energy field surrounded the structure, which had been built on a slab of what looked like gray marble. Connie saw that the manufactured stone had remained perfectly smooth after five millennia, like many other Gem ruins she had seen, and that no ocean life had been able to take root in its flawless surface. Beneath the hemispherical energy field stood a structure seemingly carved from a single stone, a featureless, cylindrical, round-topped obelisk of black stone that stood perhaps as tall as the statue above the Gems’ temple. It reminded Connie of a planetarium, like the one she had visited on a field trip at school.

As the Gem Sloop settled onto the sandy bottom, they disembarked, careful of where they stepped until they reached the flat gray marble, which clicked dryly underfoot like a pristine tile floor. 

Zircon’s self-satisfied look didn’t escape their notice as they approached the flickering white hemisphere that surrounded the Forge. “You seem pleased with yourself,” Garnet said to her.

“Yeah, we’re about to go in there and rearrange your buddies’ facets,” Amethyst said, smacking a fist into her open palm.

“Oh, are you?” Zircon replied smugly.

Amethyst had an answer ready, but lost it as she bumped face-first into the glowing white field and bounced off. “Ow. Hey!” she cried, and thumped her fists against the barrier. An electric bzzt emerged with each punch, repelling her hands from the glowing energy.

Gritting her teeth, Garnet summoned her gauntlets and began to press into the force field. As the powerful fusion grunted and strained, Connie thought she saw the surface of the field begin to bend inward. But ultimately, Garnet’s feet slid backwards as the force of her efforts pushed against her. Even if she had the strength to overpower the field, she lacked the leverage she would need for it.

“Ha!” Zircon sneered. “The entire facility is surrounded by a gravity shield to counteract the pressure at these depths. It’s practically impenetrable! Just give up now, let me go free, and stop embarrassing yoursel—”

Lapis snarled and thrust out her hand. The distant wall of water behind them answered her call, and rippled outward, becoming a thick tentacle of water that stretched inward from the edge of the shaft. Rearing back, Lapis brought her hand crashing forward, and the tentacle moved in reply, slamming into the white bubble. The kaiju-like tendril pushed down into the field, which crackled and glowed beneath the pressure. A wide, shallow divot emerged beneath the tentacle’s tip as the bubble began to deform.

Zircon stood frozen, mouth agape, glasses askew as she stared at Lapis and her ocean straining mightily against the gravity shield. “How?” stammered Zircon. “How have we never seen this kind of power from you rebels before?”

Amethyst shrugged, and said, “It’s her first day.”

Lapis’s whole body trembled, and she dropped to one knee. “Try…it…now…” she grunted. Her arms shook as she held them aloft, her hands curling as if wrapped around the shape of the immense tendril she commanded.

As Connie watched, Garnet plunged her hands into the gravity shield again. This time, the field had dimmed, practically transparent everywhere else as the majority of its power had shifted to push back against Lapis. The gauntlets crackled with their own electric power, and suddenly Garnet’s fingers pierced the field. With another grunt of effort, Garnet parted the luminous tear like curtains, creating a dark space that widened as she drew her hands further apart. She wedged one foot in for good measure, and then pushed with all three limbs, pulling herself into the opening and holding it against her palms and boot, stretching herself to make a gap large enough for the rest of them to slip through one at a time. “Hurry!” she grunted.

Amethyst wasted no time, picking Zircon up bodily and throwing her through the opening before the pink prisoner could do anything but yelp. Then she curled into a whirling white ball and spin-dashed through.

After the rest of them had hopped inside the gravity shield, Garnet looked up at Lapis. “Coming?” Garnet said in a strained voice. Her arms and leg wobbled, belying how little time she had left before the barrier squeezed shut on her.

Lapis managed a shake of her head. Her enormous water tendril trembled just as Garnet’s limbs did, fighting against the gravitic pressure of the shield. Connie couldn’t guess how much raw pressure it took to bend a shield designed to withstand hundreds of atmospheres of pressure, but she knew even Lapis couldn’t keep up such an effort forever. “Go!” she hissed through her teeth.

Nodding, Garnet rolled through the breach, and the gravity shield closed up behind her as she rose to her feet, joining her friends inside the bubble.

Steven hesitated at the inner edge of the bubble, anxiously watching as Lapis cast the tendril of water back into the vertical ocean wall surrounding the Forge. “Are you okay?” he cried as she fell to her hands and knees, huffing with spent effort.

Lapis nodded tiredly. “I’m okay,” she assured him through the shield. “Somebody’s gotta stay here and keep the way out open for you. Go save Peridot. And be safe, Steven,” she told him. “You too, Connie.”

Pearl rested a gentle hand on Steven’s shoulder, shepherding him back toward the others. “We’ll get her back,” Pearl promised Lapis.

“And…and you guys be safe too,” Lapis called after them. Her arms folded around her stomach as she rose unsteadily, casting her eyes down at the seabed. “Peridot would be sad if anything happened to any of you.”

Amethyst flashed her a grin and offered a thumbs-up. “Can’t have that!” she agreed.

The gray stone squeaked with perfect cleanliness as they approached the Forge’s featureless outer wall. No door or other entranceway made itself immediately apparent. Connie craned her neck back, wondering if they would have to scale the stone somehow to find some possible way in at the top. She almost tried jumping against the wall to test if it was adaptive architecture, like the bunker she and Garnet had explored, but then thought better of it. If this would be her final mission as a Crystal Gem, she would rather not make a fool of herself by pratfalling onto the ground from trying to walk on walls.

Zircon dripped with nervous photonic sweat as the Crystal Gems mulled over their lack of options. “Oh, well. No way in, and probably nobody home. We should—”

Garnet snagged one of Zircon’s hands and pressed it palm-first against a seemingly random part of the wall. A pane of light glowed beneath Zircon’s hand, and a chime rang out from the building. Beside the glowing square, the wall of the Forge rippled like liquid and drew back into itself, revealing the shape of a high arch, and a tunnel within that led deeper into some brightly-lit chamber inside. 

“Oh. There’s the door,” Zircon said, laughing nervously as Garnet released her wrist. “How silly of me.”

Garnet regarded her grimly. “After you,” she said. The words were polite, and not a request.

The tunnel revealed just how thick the exterior walls of the Celerity Forge were. Nearly twenty feet of solid black stone loomed between them and the end of the tunnel. Connie guessed it was a precaution, in case the gravity shield outside ever failed, to prevent the building from collapsing under the titanic weight of the ocean outside. 

They walked in a tight formation, with Zircon at the front and Garnet close behind. Each footstep clicked smartly on the dry black floor, and the echo of the tunnel made it sound like muffled applause. Soon, though, a pair of familiar voices from beyond the end of the tunnel drown out the sound of their own feet.

“Flint? I think someone’s at the front door,” Milky said, unseen.

“Are you cracked? We’re at the bottom of an ocean!” Flint scoffed loudly. “The one good thing about this mudball having so much water is that it keeps out the unwelcomeables. Why would this place even have a door?”

Zircon drew a sharp breath, possibly to yell a warning, but choked silent as Garnet’s gauntleted hand fell on her shoulder. The pink Gem shrank under her heavy touch, and continued to walk without a word.

“The top opens like a door. That’s how we got the ship down here,” Milky replied.

“Yes, fine, the jankin’ roof opens. Too right, you are. But we’re not upstairs, are we?” snapped Flint.

“I guess not,” admitted Milky.

“Then there’s nobody coming in the front door we don’t have!” snarled Flint.

“Okay. But somebody should really tell them that.”

Connie blinked in the bright light as they emerged from the mouth of the tunnel into a wide, open, high-ceilinged chamber. The room seemed to comprise the entire base of the cylindrical Forge, and unlike its harsh obsidian exterior, its interiors were made from some intricate masonry tinted in a soft, pleasant blue tone. At the far side of the chamber, a series of floating stairs followed the inner edge of the wall in a sequence that led up into some new floor above. Murals encircled the curved walls, depictions of mighty Diamonds in all four colors, as well as dark silhouettes of ancient Gem spacecraft, rendered as little more than geometric oddities by the simplicity of the art style.

But Connie could identify those silhouettes as spaceships easily, for there were physical examples of those designs hanging overhead. Spacecraft, perhaps a dozen of them, loomed near the ceiling. Based on the size and the details of each ship, Connie guessed they were models, replicas of the real things, only scaled down and rendered in loving detail as art objects made from spaceworthy alloys. That made the large, open atrium some kind of museum, or perhaps a showroom floor, for the Gem Empire’s astronautical triumphs.

Flint stood atop a long, narrow craft that resembled a sleek alien rocket, complete with tailfins. Her arms hung broadly to either side of her as she balanced, seemingly out of sheer boredom, at the very tip of the model. As the fake rocket bobbed slightly under Flint’s weight, Connie realized that there were no wires or cables keeping the armada of models in place. Rather, they were hovering on their own, kept aloft by some other miraculous Gem technology.

Milky stood firmly on the ground below Flint’s balancing act. The hulking Quartz had her big hand aimed at the tunnel, and her gemstone shone brightly as it detected the small strike force of Crystal Gems walking into the chamber. “Oh, Zircon’s back. Hi, Zircon!” Milky said. Her gemstone left little contrails of light in the air as she waved.

Sputtering, Flint whipped her head down and around to finally spot the group entering the chamber. In her surprise, she lost her footing and plummeted, bouncing off the floor with a pained oof! Then, shambling back to her feet, she ripped a black javelin out of her gemstone and brought it to bear at the Crystal Gems. “You lot again? How did you— Zircon, you little traitor!” the gangly Quartz snarled.

As Connie and the rest of the Crystal Gems drew their weapons, Zircon cowed in front of them. “I was coerced!” she whined. “After YOU left me behind!”

“Guys, can we please skip this part?” Amethyst groaned as she pulled her whip taught between her fists. “You guys always fight us, and you always lose. I’m starting to get embarrassed for you.”

As Milky seemed to catch on to what was happening, and summoned her hammerhead weapon over her gigantic fist, Flint actually relaxed. Bracing the tip of her javelin against the floor, she leaned her elbow on the butt of it and said, “You know what? You’re right. Please, go right on ahead.” 

“Really?” Pearl said, suspicious.

“Really?” Milky asked, and dissipated her hammerhead as she glanced at Flint in confusion.

“Really,” insisted Flint. “Those stairs, right back there. Straight up to the next level. You’ll find a particularly unpleasant Polarite working up there. Don’t mind her.”

“Sweet!” Amethyst rolled herself into a spin-dash, her whip wrapping around her form to create a studded, whirling white ball of destruction, and she zoomed around the pair of Quartz guardians toward the stairs before Garnet or Pearl could stop her. Bouncing, she dashed across the floor and up the floating stairs, disappearing quickly into the opening in the ceiling.

But as quickly as she’d vanished, she hurtled back down the stairs, unfurling into a loose collection of limbs and hair that slammed back onto the floor with a grunt of pain. Woozily, Amethyst lifted her head from the stone floor and looked up the steps, as the rest of the Crystal Gems watched the top of the stairs intently for whatever had blocked Amethyst’s path.

Clack. A bare black foot appeared at the top step. Clack. Another, and a long skirt that nearly covered both. Clack. A broad frame descending into view, with thick ebony curls cascading down its back.

It took Connie an extra moment to recognize the thing that came down the stairs. It was another Gemunculus—the third of the three golden orbs Polarite had brought with her when she’d landed in the strawberry battlefield—made from the same black stone material as the exterior of the Celerity Forge. This Gemunculus wore a flowing dress over a powerful build, and possessed ringlets of thick black hair. Glowing golden eyes peered out from a face of serene, cherubic beauty.

“I,” the Gemunculus announced, “am Rose Quartz.”

Connie felt her innards clench as she recognized the figure at last. Though cast in black, she could have otherwise stepped out of the portrait hung above the door in the beach house. 

Frozen with shock, Connie flicked her eyes between the others, and saw that they had made the connection far sooner than she had. Garnet trembled, with her gauntlets clenched at her sides so tightly that Connie could hear their rigid material creaking under the strain. Pearl stood with her hands clapped over her mouth, tears streaming down her face and through her fingers as she smothered her own sob. Even Amethyst, ever-boisterous, panicked and scrambled backwards, throwing herself into a desperate sprint. She didn’t dare look back until she stood behind Garnet and Pearl, and even then, it was with quivering knees.

But Steven… 

Connie had fought long and hard to not look at Steven since they’d started their journey in the Gem Sloop. Not out of shame, or aversion, but because she didn’t know if she could trust herself to look at Steven without the memory of what she’d said to him sending her over the brink of tears.

She couldn’t help but look now, and her heart broke in half. Silent tears glistened on his cheeks. His shield had vanished into a puff of pink motes, his arms dangling limply at his sides. His bottom lip quivered as he breathed a single word, speaking so softly that even Connie by his side couldn’t make it out until he whispered it again. “Mom?”

The black Rose Quartz continued down the stairs. Her melodious voice spoke plainly as she declared, “I betrayed the perfect beings who made me. I corrupted innocent Gems, bending them to my will. I carry the shame, the sickness, that broke our Empire. And I alone am the one dark stain in our glorious history. Know my follies, and rise above them.”

Flint grinned as the Gemunculus approached to stand with the two enemy Quartzes. “You like her? We rolled her up as soon as we got back. Figured you lot might find a way to muck about here somehow. Fancy a reunion?”

Connie felt numb as she watched the simulacrum of the original Crystal Gem take sides against her own disciples. She didn’t know exactly what a Gemunculus was—an echo, a fragment, or a wholly fabricated lie—but she could see and feel the effects of those words on the Gems who had known Rose. Even with superior numbers, Connie feared they might not overcome such a foe.

But then Pearl dropped her hands from her mouth, which had set into a hard line. “You’re not her,” she growled, and swiped the tears from her scowling eyes.

“Not even close!” Amethyst snarled. She lashed her whip, cracking it overhead like a gunshot.

“I,” the Gemunculus said, beginning her speech again, “am Ro—”

“No, you’re NOT!” Garnet exploded. Her shout became a scream that filled the hollow chamber, so loud and so forceful that Pearl and Amethyst were drawn into it. All three Gems bellowed, stepping forward. 

Then, together, all three melted into white light and poured into each other.

Connie had seen fusions many times before. She had been part of one, and knew what kind of unity and harmony it took to initiate that transformation. Most often, it took a dance, or some other shared movement, to draw two or more beings together into one. 

This time, it had been the raw, unfiltered rage of seeing the Gem they had all loved dearly being twisted into some empty mockery of herself. And it had swallowed all three Gems, without any of them even touching each other, into a single fusion.

Flint laughed as she watched three amorphous forms melding together into one. “Gonna bring out another one of your sick little fusions, are you? We’re ready for your games this time, you… Hey. Hey! Stop growing! STOP GROWING! GO BACK!”

As the haughty Quartz’s bravado crumbled into panic, the shimmering light that had been Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl loomed blindingly bright above Connie and Steven. Connie watched the shape grow six hands and two feet, thudding into the floor at either side of the hybrid teens as the light began to shift back into mass.

Then Connie realized that they were about to be underfoot. She grabbed Steven by the hand and started to pull him. Before she made it two steps, she remembered Zircon, and snared the collar of the pink Gem’s frilly blouse with her other hand. “Run!” she screamed.

Dragging Steven and Zircon behind her, Connie sprinted out from under the coalescing foot of a three-story titan’s purple boot. Swathed in muted maroons and greens, with six powerful arms each ending in a fist the size of a family sedan, festooned with four gemstones, and sporting a billboard-sized reflective visor that framed her magenta features, was a fusion that Connie had first met long ago at a very awkward dinner.

Alexandrite.

The towering fusion’s lip curled as she sneered down at Flint, Milky, and the faux-Rose. Then her whole face flapped open at the chin, revealing a second, feral, enormous mouth that split open to shake the room with a roar so loud, Connie could feel it in her bones more than hear it with her ears.

Steven shook out of his stupor at the brain-rattling volume of Alexandrite’s fury, and stumbled behind Connie, losing her hand as they reached the base of the stairs. “Wait!” he cried. “Shouldn’t we stay and—”

Even as he started the question, Alexandrite grabbed one of the floating models that hovered eye-level with her at the ceiling. The saucer-like ship model crumpled at the edges under Alexandrite’s grip, and then shattered as the huge fusion slammed it down on top of Milky. Flint and the Gemunculus scattered as the huge Quartz disappeared under the saucer ship with a wail that cut short underneath the crash of metal crumpling against the floor.

“We probably shouldn’t,” Connie said, and winced in unwanted sympathy for Milky’s pain. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Alexandrite’s splash damage could do to a squishier human body. Better they were out of the way, at least until the Gems who made Alexandrite had calmed down a little.

“Right,” Steven said. “They’re probably working out a few things. We should give them some space.”

“Not that you asked for my opinion, but I vehemently concur,” Zircon added. “Can we go now?”

Connie’s gaze lingered not on the kaiju-sized fusion slapping Flint across the room and into the wall like a racketball, but instead on Steven’s pained features. He couldn’t help but stare at the blackened facsimile of his mother as she danced across the room ahead of Alexandrite’s crushing boots. Connie wanted to hug him, to ask him if he was alright, even while she knew he wasn’t. 

But when he noticed her attention and turned, she looked away, back up toward the top of the stairs, where—if Flint’s jesting was to be believed—Polarite worked on the next stage of Shard’s vision.

If she lived through this rescue, she could worry about making things right with Steven. Until then, her guilt would have to be satisfied by being fuel for her half-hollow. 

“Let’s go,” she said, and charged up the stairs without looking back.

Chapter Text

The stairway yielded to a sharp right turn opening into a broad corridor that ran down the center of the second floor. Six doors lined the walls of the corridor, three on each side, each one possessed with a sturdiness that reminded Connie of the once-impassable door to the Gems’ temple. She was used to Gem architecture being grand and huge, like the room below them, which made the businesslike regularity of these smaller suites seem unusual by comparison.

Shimmering white light radiated from the far end of the corridor, and drew Connie and Steven forward. Zircon led the way, prodded by Connie. They hadn’t yet encountered any static defenses beyond the gravity shield outside, but Connie had read and watched too many adventure stories to ever fully discount the presence of booby traps in an ancient ruin. Just in case Shard’s hench-Gems had reactivated anything of the sort, she wanted Zircon to stumble into them first.

“There’s no need to be rude!” Zircon huffed, rubbing at her back where Connie’s pointy elbows kept spurring her forward. “In fact, if you wait a moment, I can probably come up with a proper introduction for you, so we can all be on good terms. Do you prefer ‘Crystal Gems’ or ‘rebels?’ The latter is more common, but I suspect it’s no longer popular here on Earth.”

“I think we know your friends about as well as we need to,” Steven said, regretful. “At least until they decide they want to be a little nicer.”

“Nicer? As if you’re one to talk, with that ghastly display your cohorts are putting on downstairs,” Zircon sniffed. “How a Sapphire can even be seen with such a bunch, let alone fuse with them, and not dissipate herself from embarrassment is beyond me!”

“We’ll stop embarrassing ourselves and leave as soon as we have Peridot,” Connie said dryly.

“Good. She’ll be right in here, working with—Polarite, hello!”

Zircon’s grumping rose into a delighted greeting as the three of them emerged from the corridor into a larger atrium. In the back, another curving, floating stair-sequence rose up into the unseen next floor. This was the architectural grandeur Connie had come to expect, with vaulted ceilings curving overhead as though to wrap around the very literal heart of the room. 

At the center, two pedestals sat, and upon the leftmost one loomed a glowing crystal heart, this one far bigger and brighter than the broken one they had found inside the wreckage of the colony ship. Cables and conduit plugged into veins extending from the heart, their lengths snaking across the floor and up into the walls to feed the rooms they had passed with power. 

The empty pedestal had similar conduits around it, but all unplugged and lying unused. Remembering Peridot’s theory about power sources, Connie could guess that a second crystal heart had once stood there as well, now removed to serve Shard’s purposes.

At the base of the pedestals, a half-circle console stood, adorned with the floating screens and asymmetrical colorful controls. Strewn about the console were empty cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. Most of them bore the logo of Buy’n’Large, the super-conglomerate store, and were filled with smaller discarded boxes for dozens of different electronics and appliances. Connie sincerely doubted that anyone in Shard’s coterie maintained a membership to the chain of box stores, and wondered at the back of her mind if aliens could be prosecuted for grand larceny. 

Polarite sat cross-legged amidst the empty boxes, oblivious to Zircon’s greeting. One of her hands had transformed into a soldering iron, which she touched carefully to a nest of wires and circuit boards cobbled together from the guts of her ill-gotten devices. “This would be going so much faster,” she complained, “if you could refrain from using the word ‘clod’ six times per sentence!”

At first glance, the object of her complaint was Peridot’s missing camper. The little garbage can drone sat placidly next to Polarite on its caterpillar treads, seemingly unruffled by Polarite’s criticisms. Then Connie spied a small, flat, tablet-like object mounted upright atop the lid of the garbage can, acting like a display of sorts. As the can swiveled, Connie could see rows of Gem-glyph text filling the screen alongside technical diagrams and schematics. The can, it seemed, only served as a mobile platform for the information tablet.

And as the can turned again at Polarite’s irritated gesture, Connie saw the back of the tablet, where a triangular green stone was set within a thick silver ring.

“There she is!” Connie told Steven, and pointed to the can-mounted tablet.

Her shout startled Polarite, who jumped to her feet, her lab coat whorling as the cobbled device tumbled and scattered into pieces on the floor. “What? Zircon!” the offended Gem huffed. “You brought these creatures to our base? What were you thinking!”

“I don’t know,” Zircon retorted in a mocking tone, “maybe that I was being held by lunatic dissidents after my own coterie abandoned me!”

A grim sneer curled Polarite’s lip. “Well, I’m sure Shard will consider that a reasonable excuse for betrayal when you explain it to her.

The words sent a chill through Connie so cold that she even saw Steven and Zircon shiver at them. The frilly pink Gem gave voice to their collective shock. “She…She’s here? Already?”

“She only landed a few decicrons ago,” Polarite said. “Perhaps you’d like to go upstairs and pay your respects?”

Zircon descended into a tizzy, gesturing frantically as she staggered back and forth. “I have to go to her! I can explain this! I need to—”

Connie ripped her sailcloth sword from Jade’s gemstone and swung its edge around to rest beneath Zircon’s chin. The quick motion shocked Zircon into utter stillness, and made Steven jolt with surprise. “Sit on the floor,” Connie said, “and don’t move.”

Slowly, warily, Zircon lowered herself to the floor and hugged her knees to her chest. “Yes, I’ll do just that,” she squeaked.

Bellowing a war cry, Connie leapt forward and raised her sword high. The sailcloth blade gleamed in the harsh light of the crystal heart, glinting with deadly promise as she brought it down in a stroke that would cleave the arrogant Gem scientist straight down the middle.

A purple energized webbing flashed between Polarite’s floating fingers, creating a large, translucent mitt that surrounded her hand. She caught Connie’s sword against her new crackling palm, and the fingers wrapped around the blade, stopping it cold above her bristly flat-topped hair. 

Connie strained, trying to press the sword down, but Polarite’s glowing mitt held it fast. The Gem leered at her with a triumphant smirk. “You think manipulating mere metal is all my tools can do? They are more versatile and more powerful than any paltry intrinsic construct a half-Gem monstrosity like you could ever hope to manifest. Witness how my technical superiority will—OHSTARS!”

With the strength of a Jade, Connie twisted her whole body around, dragging her sword with her, and Polarite with it. The screaming enemy Gem’s glowing hand remained locked around the blade as Connie spun in a full circle and slammed Polarite face-first into the command console at the base of the crystal heart hard enough to crack its translucent crystalline material. Then Connie spun again, winding up and hammer-throwing her sword and the Gem attached to it across the room.

Polarite tumbled through the air, screaming, and then slammed silent into the wall and collapsed into a heap at the foot of the floating stairs. The energy web around her hand clicked off, and the sword within it evaporated into green motes.

“...owwww.” groaned Polarite, rolling onto her side.

The captured camper rolled obediently to Polarite’s side, carrying the floating tablet with it. Connie followed it and loomed above Polarite. “Now show us how to get Peridot out of this thing,” she said, folding her arms and trying to look menacing. 

“It’s okay. I got this,” Steven said, following after the garbage can drone. He plucked the tablet out of its floating perch and, with a little twist, wrenched the device in half. The triangular green gemstone plinked on the floor amidst a spray of crystal screen fragments and Gem tech innards.

Immediately, the gemstone lit from within with a white radiance that outshone the crystal heart towering above them. The stone lifted from the ground, rising atop the light seeping out of it, until it stood upon a blob of living light. Limbs took shape from the light, and glowing features took form—nose, eyes, mouth, and a large, triangular crown—and then the glow faded, revealing the new Peridot.

Her colors remained the same: vibrant green skin and stiff, straw-like yellow hair. But Peridot’s tunic no longer bore a yellow diamond. A five-pointed star now shone in its place, complemented by matching black stars on the knees of her green leggings. Her translucent yellow safety visor had transformed into bold angular glasses sat perched on her button nose, leaving her gemstone proudly on display.

As she staggered in her first moments of recorporealization, Steven swept her up in a tremendous hug. “Peridot! You’re back! And you look amazing!” he cried.

Disoriented, Peridot reflexively returned the hug. Then her eyes flew open, and she shoved herself free from Steven’s arms. “No!” she cried, and rushed to the command console.

Connie felt her sense of triumph melting as she watched Peridot frantically work the alien controls of the console. “What’s wrong?” she said.

Peridot spared the dazed Polarite a sneer while she flicked and swiped through screens filled with Gem glyphs. “One of the first things this CLOD made me do was create a program set to trigger when they leave,” she explained. “I didn’t have a choice. The hardware suppressed all cognitive functions and reduced me to pure information. I tried to fight her, but…”

“What did she do?” Steven said worriedly, joining Connie with Peridot at the console.

The two teens watched, uncomprehending, as Peridot showed them a series of screens floating above the console. “The gravity shield of the Celerity Forge is designed to sustain a tunnel of vectored gravity upward to allow ships in and out. It’s like an entrance tunnel you can turn on and off. Only, the next time it activates, it’ll stay open long enough for their ship to leave. Then, it’ll overload, firing at ten thousand percent capacity straight upward.”

Steven scratched his head. “So, it’ll create a sturdier tunnel after they’re gone?”

Peridot shifted impatiently from foot to foot, too anxious to keep still. “No, Steven! The shield is designed to push back against five hundred atmospheres. Once overloaded, it will project a vector of gravity strong enough to rip away almost forty percent of Earth’s atmosphere, and a huge chunk of the ocean, shooting them straight into space! They’re going to destroy the Earth!”

“Patently false,” a slurring Polarite said, weakly rising to her hands and knees. “The Earth will persist quite ably. It’s the living creatures on its surface who will fare considerably less well.”

Connie’s stomach dropped as she imagined the geyser of pure gravity that would erupt from the Forge, a plume of air and water glittering into the void of space. Dimly, she recalled as a child being jealous of planets like Saturn and Neptune, and wondering why Earth couldn’t have its own rings. With all of that ejecta blown into orbit, it might develop some rings after all, at a terrible cost.

“Peridot,” Connie choked weakly, “is everybody going to suffocate with that much of the atmosphere gone?”

“No, that definitely won’t happen,” Peridot assured her as she continued to work at a fevered pace.

“That’s a relief,” Steven sighed.

“The shockwave resulting from the atmospheric pressure re-equalizing after the discharge will definitely kill every living thing on the planet before that happens,” the little Gem continued matter-of-factly.

“And my relief is gone,” Steven whimpered. “Can’t you stop it?”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” scoffed Peridot. “I’ll just delete the triggering subroutine she made me write, and—”

A golden axe smashed the controls, burying one of its double heads deep into the crystalline material, mere inches away from lopping Peridot’s hand at the wrist. The rejuvenated engineer jerked her hand back as she leapt away from the console and into Steven’s arms with a startled scream.

Connie turned, following the trajectory of the hurled axe back to the golden hand at its source. Pyrite stood at the foot of the staircase behind them, and drew her hand back to reach under the cape at her shoulder. With a muffled flash, the hand came back with a new axe, while the original in the console disappeared into glittering yellow motes.

Pyrite aimed her mirrored visor down at Connie and Steven, catching them both in its reflection. “So that’s what’s causing all of the noise downstairs,” she sneered.

Far below them, the bottom level of the Forge shuddered at some titanic impact. Alexandrite’s roar shook the floor under their feet, drowning out the muffled screams of horror that must have belonged to Flint and Milky.

“It’s only a little bit our fault,” Steven admitted. His shield snapped into existence over his arm, encompassing him and Peridot behind its translucent pink protection.

Connie gripped her sword in both hands and lowered herself into a readied stance. “Peridot,” she said without taking her eyes off Pyrite, “can you still undo their gravity thing?”

“Maybe,” Peridot said, clambering out of Steven’s arms to hide behind him as she considered the darkened, ruined console. “But I’ll have to hardwire any changes at this point. That interface is scrapped.”

“Peridot, don’t bother,” Pyrite said mockingly. Then she glanced aside and grunted to Polarite, “Get that second heart packed up. We should be gone already.”

“Packed up?” Polarite echoed in disbelief as she shambled to her feet. “I’d only started on the next containment device, and this one won’t have any plastanium to use in it. It could take days!”

“You’ll have as much time as you need,” snapped Pyrite. Her purple brows creased down behind her visor in a scowl. “I’ll clear out the opening match up here, and then get to the main event downstairs, since those two idiots can’t seem to handle anything on their own.”

“Do it,” Connie told Peridot, heedless of Pyrite’s confidence.

Then she charged.

Pyrite’s axe was already moving, swinging down to cleave through Connie in one mighty arc. The motion appeared almost lazy for the gladiator, but her weapon was a blur. It was all Connie could do to put her sword between her and the axe’s razor edge. She couldn’t hope to block it.

So she didn’t. Instead, Connie shifted her weight behind her sword and jumped, using the blow to propel her backwards. Her feet slid to a stop a dozen feet back.

The unexpected give in Connie’s defense pushed Pyrite off-balance. That’s when Steven leapt in and drove his shield into Pyrite’s chest, slamming the powerful Gem backwards into the wall.

It was a combo Pearl had taught them long ago, one they had practiced hundreds of times against their mentor’s holograms. And it put Pyrite flat against the far wall with her axe hanging limply from one hand.

Peridot craned her eyes above the ruined console as she dug through its innards, pulling translucent crystal cables and components out through the gash left by Pyrite’s axe. “Yeah! Go, Steven! Go, Connie Jade!” she cheered.

Then a pair of floating hands caught Peridot by the shoulders and tried to wrestle her out of the console’s guts. “Stop that!” Polarite chided. “I need to put you back into a cognitive processor. We have work to do, you little clod!”

“You’re the clod!” Peridot squalled, kicking and flailing against Polarite’s grasp. “And seriously, who needs someone to tell them how to reboot a power command console? You have the technical knowhow of a cracked Bauxite!”

“I reserve my focus for higher matters and leave the technical details to specks like you!” retorted Polarite.

Off to the side, still cross-legged on the floor, Zircon lifted a finger and said in a plaintive tone, “I would just like to remind everyone that I’m still following instructions and staying out of the way.”

“Thank you!” Steven replied earnestly.

Pyrite pushed herself off the wall. Her shoulders shook with a rumbling chuckle as she swung her weapon back into grip. “Honestly, I was hoping for this. Wiping out the planet’s surface while we watch from space? That’s no way to beat somebody.”

“Stop talking,” Connie growled at her. She didn’t charge forward again. The same trick wouldn’t work twice, she knew, so she began carefully side-stepping until she stood elbow-to-elbow with Steven again.

“Usually I just crush my opponents and add them to my trophy,” Pyrite continued as if Connie hadn’t spoken. A shrug of one shoulder put her black cape on display. Draped over the top of her arm, it glittered with the dust of a thousand different colors, iridescent beneath the harsh light of the crystal heart. “But you? You gave me something even better.”

Connie’s rage flared, rattling the lid on her half-hollow, as Pyrite shrugged her other shoulder, where the hilt of Rose Quartz’s sword still loomed, tied to Pyrite’s back with a simple black strap looped around her chest. “Stop talking!” snarled Connie.

“Since this is the last time we fight,” Pyrite said, grinning, “what do you think I should take? Do your bodies stay behind like the other weird creatures on this planet, or do you poof like real Gems? Not that you’d know anything about being real Gems, since, I mean…look at you.”

Half a step. Connie’s fury dragged her forward, ready to hack Pyrite apart for her arrogance, for her dismissive nonchalance, for her cruelty and disinterest in the fate of the entire planet over whatever stupid rivalry the gladiator had concocted between them. 

But she only made it half a step before Steven’s light touch at her elbow made Connie stop. Her eyes flicked sideways, catching his gaze for the first time since she had fled the beach house in tears over the cruelty she’d hurled at him. 

His eyes glimmered with the same warmth and surety Connie had come to know. Even at the bottom of the ocean, in a life-and-death battle, his eyes becalmed her, blunted her rage, and spoke a silent word that she recognized instantly.

Together.

The power of that silent word flooded through Connie, pouring over the raggedy walls of her half-hollow and cooling her anger. Her breathing slowed, and her muscles unclenched. She found her footing again, and met Pyrite’s mirrored gaze.

“Shut up and fight,” Connie grunted.

Seeing her verbal gambit fail made Pyrite grin harder. “Glad to,” she said.

The floor shook again, this time from Pyrite’s heavy footfalls as the gladiator bore down on Connie and Steven with her axe already in motion. The blade swung between the two, seeking to drive them apart. Connie could tell by her tactics, by the way her weight fell between the pair, that Pyrite knew how to fight two opponents at once: keep them divided, working at cross-purposes, getting in each other’s way, until the fight became too muddled for superior numbers to hold any advantage.

But Connie and Steven knew how to fight as a team. Even as Connie fell back, Steven held his ground, taking the brunt of Pyrite’s onslaught against his shield. No matter how hard the bigger Gem swung, her double-headed axe bounced off of the shield’s rose pattern without leaving so much as a mark. Nothing Pyrite could muster would pierce Steven’s total defense.

Pyrite’s frustration made her attention linger a half-second too long on Steven, giving Connie her opening. She strafed behind Pyrite, slashing once at each of the Gem’s ankles. Howling in pain, Pyrite collapsed to her knees, and then snapped silent as Steven’s shield drove straight into her jaw, knocking her flat. She tried rolling backwards to recover, but Connie was already there, keeping the gladiator off-balance, her sword a blur of green.

A small, satisfied part of Connie noticed that Pyrite had stopped talking. Everywhere the bigger Gem tried to turn, Connie or Steven was already there. He went high where Connie swung low. She jumped and cleaved as Steven went for the knees. Pyrite’s axe couldn’t be in two places at once, a lesson she began to learn with each hard-earned bruise and cut they drew out of her.

They moved in perfect tandem, like a dance. They were two streams merging into a mighty river, sweeping Pyrite backwards in the force of their current, until she had her back pressed to the wall once more. Together, Connie and Steven lifted their weapons and drove forward, sharing a furious yell as they sought to end the battle with one united strike.

With a snarl, Pyrite reached across her chest and ripped Rose’s sword free of its tie. With the axe and sword, she blocked the combined strike, and threw both Steven and Connie off of her. 

The sudden counter threw Connie onto her back foot. Suddenly, Pyrite had twice as many weapons, and bore down on Connie with both of them. Connie’s arms shook at each block, her sailcloth sword barely able to keep up with Pyrite’s full attention. Then she flew backwards as Pyrite kicked, filling her chest with a boot that knocked the wind out of her entirely. As she felt the ground slam into her back, something pink flashed above her. 

With the last of her strength, Connie rolled on instinct, throwing herself sideways on the floor. The blade of Rose’s sword thunked into the floor, and Connie heard something tearing behind her. Numb, breathless, Connie’s hand flew to her head, expecting to find a bloody mess. Instead, she felt bare neck. 

The sword pulled out of the floor, sending a wave of black strands fluttering. Half of Connie’s hair sat in the floor, the hewn ends driven into the stone by the force of Pyrite’s blow and torn from Connie’s head, leaving the crooked remains of her hair dangling behind Connie at a slant.

Gasping and sprawled backwards on the floor, Connie watched helplessly as Pyrite turned on Steven. He’d only gotten his balance back, and yelped as his shield rattled beneath the fury of Pyrite’s axe and his own sword turned against him. She pounded against his shield, driving him backwards as she attacked from every angle. 

Then, with a grace her size shouldn’t have allowed, she flipped up and over Steven. He was too slow by a hair to bring his shield around before Pyrite’s heel caught him in the back of his head, kicking him facedown onto the floor. When he tried to rise, she planted that bootheel squarely between his shoulders, pinning him to the floor as she raised the axe and sword.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” Pyrite’s voice held none of the playfulness from mere moments before. Her shoulders heaved with effort, her body littered with cuts and bruises from all of the close calls Steven and Connie had threatened upon her. “No one can beat me! No Quartz, no Jade, no nothing! No one ever has, and no one ever will!”

Her mirrored gaze fell to the back of Steven’s neck.

“But you won’t have to worry about that anymore,” she growled, and swung.

Connie hadn’t called upon her half-hollow since it had faltered in the last fight. She’d been too uncertain and, in the deepest and most honest parts of herself, too scared to try. If the gemstone still refused to heed her, then it meant she had failed everything: her summer, her best friend, and the Gem who had entrusted her with the stone in the first place.

She forgot all of that as she watched the axe head falling upon Steven’s neck. “NO!” Connie screamed.

The room exploded into a tempest. The most ferocious wind Connie had ever summoned whipped around her. The crooked half of her hair billowed around her head in a halo as Connie threw the tempest into Pyrite.

Pyrite slammed into the far wall again, this time hard enough to crack the stone. Her axe dissipated, and the stolen sword lay flat against the surface of the wall, pinned like Pyrite was by the sheer force of the wind. The bilious force pushed ripples through Pyrite’s cheeks and ballooned in her lips as she struggled against it, her own purple hair pasted behind her.

Even as focused as Connie made the tempest, the backwash of her wind tunnel sent the bickering Peridot and Polarite ducking behind the console for cover, and pushed Zircon across the floor and into the wall opposite Pyrite. 

But Connie kept her focus entirely on Pyrite, pushing with everything she had left in her half-hollow. She could feel its power depleting as she pushed and shoved and hurled the wind.

Steven lifted his head, but then ducked back down as the wind threatened to rip the hair from his head. “Connie!” he cried.

All too quickly, the wind began to ebb. “Steven!” Connie shouted. “Hurry! Run downstairs and get one of the Gems!”

“What? Who?” he shouted.

Connie couldn’t tell if he’d lost her words in the wind, or if he was genuinely confused. “Get anyone! Just hurry! I’ll hold her as long as I can!”

“I’m not leaving you!” he insisted.

“We can’t beat her, Steven!” Connie shouted. The wind ebbed further still, and Pyrite began to peel herself off of the wall. “...I can’t beat her. But if you fuse with another Gem, you’ll win!”

“Connie, no!”

She ignored him, and threw herself into the last of her wind. The dwindling gust carried her forward, and she thundered a warcry as she flew into the pinned gladiator. Pyrite was still reeling when Connie’s blade ripped across her face. Pyrite’s head turned with the blow as her visor went tumbling and shattered on the floor into dissipating mirrored shards.

Panting, heaving, Connie lifted her sword again, readying herself for whatever Pyrite threw back at her. She knew she couldn’t win, but she still hoped she could make it close enough to give Steven the time he needed to reach the lower floor and somehow break Alexandrite into enough components to send someone back upstairs with him. 

As Pyrite lifted her head, she brought her naked glare upon Connie. A glossy scar lay across her brow, nose, and cheek, absent only where the broken visor had protected her from Connie’s blade. One eye glistened bright yellow, boiling with rage. And where the other eye should have been, there sat instead a cubic golden gemstone.

“Wait. THAT’S your gemstone?” Peridot broke the moment between Connie and Pyrite with her shout of disbelief. “But that doesn’t make any sense! It’s the wrong shape, the wrong size, for someone built like…”

With a furious gesture, Pyrite ripped the black cape from her shoulder, revealing a second cubic gemstone in her upper arm. 

Realization struck Connie. “You’re a fusion,” she murmured. 

All of the humiliations, the overwhelming defeats, that Pyrite had visited upon her came into a new light. This whole time, she was being thrashed in a two-on-one fight, and she’d never even known it.

“This whole time?” Peridot’s look of disbelief melted into rage. “You’re a FAKE! PHONY! BOO! BOOOO!” she shouted, hopping up and down in a fit of broken hero worship.

“That explains so much,” Polarite murmured, as flummoxed as the rest.

Peridot’s head whipped around to stare at the studious Gem. “You mean you didn’t know either?” she gasped.

“Well, she’s a terribly private Gem,” Polarite hedged. “Now I see why.”

Peridot and Polarite stared at each other in shared amazement for half a moment. Then, remembering their original aims, they resumed squabbling and clawing at each other for possession of the command console’s spilled guts.

Pyrite’s rage had eclipsed any notion of words. Reaching up, she drew a fresh axe from the gemstone at her shoulder, and lifted it to cross with Rose’s sword. Stalking forward slowly, she aimed her murderous glare upon Connie.

Connie caught a lingering shape in the corner of her vision as she braced herself for Pyrite’s retaliation. “Steven, go!” she shouted without looking back. “With Jade’s gemstone, I can hold her off for a little while. But you have to hurry!”

Reaching deep into her withered half-hollow, Connie readied another hurricane gale to push Pyrite back. The gladiator loomed before her with both weapons raised, trembling with the anticipation of carving Connie apart. 

This is why I left my stone with you, human, Connie heard in her mind. With my powers, you might make enough of a difference to matter. As long as you’re willing to—

The world around her turned pink, startling Connie out of her thoughts. She recognized the effect from her very first moments with Steven, the inner wall of a bubble shield. But rather than a smooth surface, this bubble shield had manifested from dozens and dozens of smaller, flat hexagonal panes, interlocking together into an enclosed shape around her.

Pyrite’s weapons flashed down at her, and she flinched, expecting the bubble to pop. Only, it didn’t. The hexagonal plates of the shield hardly rattled as Pyrite slammed her axe and sword down on top of it. Furious, the gladiator struck again, with even less effect. Again and again, she pounded against the shield, screaming in fury, but the pink energy hardly noticed.

Soft hands grabbed Connie roughly by the elbows and spun her around, and she gasped as she came face to face with Steven. His eyes, normally dark and warm, now blazed with a pink light that hurt to look at, the same light that blazed from his gemstone beneath the hem of his shirt.. When he spoke, his voice resonated, as though it came from the shield around them as well as his lips.

“Jade is GONE!” he told her. “It’s YOUR gemstone now!”

“St-Steven?” Connie squeaked.

She realized how frightened she must have looked, because Steven released her arms and stepped back as far as the bubble would allow. The light in his eyes and gemstone dimmed until they were merely bright instead of blinding. “It sucks,” he said, “being the one left behind. It never stops sucking. We can’t talk to them, or thank them, or be mad at them, because they’re not here anymore. We can’t ask them why they did it.” He swallowed hard, and continued, “The only thing we can know for sure is that they wanted us to be here. They wanted us to live.”

“Steven, that’s—”

But he pushed through her quavering voice, shaking his head. “You can’t keep acting like you’re just carrying a Gem for someone else. It’s not just a magic rock that gives you powers. It’s not anybody else anymore. It’s you, Connie. It’s you.”

Distantly, amidst the sounds of Pyrite hammering against Steven’s empowered hexi-bubble, Connie plunged into herself, and felt the ragged edges of her half-hollow. This space inside of her, this emptied void left behind…

…was her. Hers and Jade’s minds had never been separate before. There were no walls or borders that Connie herself hadn’t put there after Jade was gone. Even the voice she kept imagining wasn’t Jade’s, didn’t have that ring of another’s distinct thoughts mingling with her own. It was Connie. It had always been Connie, compartmentalizing herself, and stuffing her bad feelings down and pretending they were fuel for Jade’s powers. Connie’s powers.

She swallowed, and felt the lump roll past the boxy green stone beneath her throat. That gemstone wasn’t just something she carried. It was a part of her now, as much a part as her arms or legs. She didn’t just carry the absence of Jade, or a rock with Jade’s powers and a mind of its own. It didn’t want her to feel bad or good. 

It didn’t resent her. It was her. It was only her. It was all her.

The walls of her half-hollow unraveled, and Connie felt everything she’d ever stuffed inside of it roiling out like a heavy fog. Her knees buckled under the weight, and she wobbled.

Steven caught her, this time holding her gently. He turned blurry through her tears as she leaned into him, her hands finding his shoulders for the strength to stand. “Steven, I…I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, for all of it,” she croaked. “I’m sorry for being so awful to you, and to everyone. Especially myself…”

He rested his forehead against hers, and smiled through tears of his own. “Don’t be sorry,” he murmured. “I just…I wish you could see what I see. How great you are. How important you are. You’re the best person I ever met. You make everything better just by being there. When I fall asleep, you’re the last person I think about, and when I wake up, you’re the first person I want to talk to. There isn’t a word for all of that.”

She closed her eyes and laughed a little sob. “Yeah, there is,” she whispered.

He laughed too. “Yeah, there is. And I do.”

“Me too,” she said.

The hexagonal plate above them cracked sharply as a bright white fissure spider-webbed through it beneath Pyrite’s axe. The fused gladiator hammered that spot, driving the cracks wider and wider, as she screamed, “I’m gonna rip you apart! I’m gonna shatter you!”

Connie glanced back at the raving Gem as if suddenly remembering she was there. “We still can’t beat Pyrite,” Connie said softly. 

“Maybe,” Steven agreed. “But I’m not leaving you. I won’t do this without you. I can’t. Okay?”

She smiled, and sniffled, and slid her arms over his shoulder to embrace him. Maybe the world would end. Maybe they wouldn’t make it out of there. But Connie knew she wouldn’t ask him to leave again. She couldn’t.

“Okay,” she whispered.

The light from Steven’s gem grew, flooding the inside of the bubble in blinding pink radiance. Even through her eyelids, Connie could see him shining.

Then the color changed at a second glow emerging from beneath Connie’s throat, as Jade’s gemstone—Connie’s gemstone—came alive like a bright green beacon. 

As the top of the bubble chipped away beneath Pyrite’s manic blows, the green and pink light within it swirled together. Connie’s and Steven’s arms tightened around each other.

And then the hexagonic bubble exploded, blasting Pyrite off her feet, as Connie and Steven melted together into pure light.

Chapter Text

Groaning, they pushed themselves up from the cold stone floor, rubbing at the back of their head. Other than a small bump from when they’d landed, nothing hurt. But the disorientation of the bubble blasting apart still lingered around them, muddling their thoughts. “Ugh. What happened?” they said.

As they blinked their eyes clear, they saw a room full of astonished faces staring back at them. Peridot and Polarite had again paused their feud over the spilled innards of the broken command console beneath the looming, glowing crystal heart. The two Gems blinked, seemingly astonished at the mere sight of them. Still on the floor, sitting cross-legged and unmoving like she’d promised, Zircon gaped at them, slack-jawed and speechless.

Pyrite rose slowly to her feet, her weapons clacking against the floor as her grip loosened, dropping the blades. A dangerous alchemy of anger and disbelief creased her face. “That’s not possible…” she said.

“Look who’s talking,” Polarite muttered. Still, there was more wonderment than snark behind her words.

“What’s everybody staring at? Is my shirt on backwards again?” they said, confused not only by everyone else’s reactions, but by having two distinct memories of the time Steven had put his shirt on backwards, and how Connie had giggled at him for it. 

They looked down, inspecting themselves, and saw a pink gem at their navel, right where it should have been, beneath the hem of their two layered cropped shirts. Bare feet wiggled on the cold floor below next to a pair of discarded sneakers and a pair of empty sandals. And there, just below their chin, sat a boxy green gemstone.

Then they realized, and exclaimed it out loud. “We fused! We’re me again! I’m us!” cried Stevonnie.

“Steven? Connie Jade?” Peridot called worriedly. “I didn’t know you could do…that. Are you okay?”

At Peridot’s question, Stevonnie suddenly clutched their gemstones, doubling over as they realized that something had changed. Something about them was profoundly different from all of the other times they had fused. “I feel…I…” they stammered, struggling for words.

“Oh, stars, she’s disassociating from her components!” Peridot cried, clutching at her hair in horror.

But Stevonnie straightened, laughing, and threw their fists high as they yelled, “I feel AMAZING! Is this what having two gems feels like? I mean, Steven knew, but even his other fusions never felt like this before! I’m, like, double-doubled. Double-squared! Four squares! I’m two-thirds of a cube! I don’t know what I am, but it feels incredible!”

Seeing Stevonnie’s elation pushed the shock out of Pyrite’s features, and she found her rage again. “I don’t care what kind of freak you become. I’ll just chop you in half, and then splatter your halves like before,” she growled, and scooped her weapons up again.

Stevonnie barely heard her. “Oh, I wonder if anything else changed! What about powers?” Jumping in the air, they grunted and strained, wiggling their feet as they tried to employ Steven’s floating abilities to suspend themselves above the floor. But each time, they came back down without delay. “What? No more floating? Boo!” they jeered at themselves.

Spotting something glinting amidst all of Polarite’s stolen Buy’n’Large boxes, they darted into the pile and pulled up a shiny new chrome-plated toaster, whose innards had been presumably sacrificed to some long-gone device of the scientist’s creation. Lifting the toaster casing to their face, they studied their reflection in the glossy side of the appliance. 

Their reflection smiled back at them, largely the same as it had always been, save for one exception. Instead of their dark, honey-colored eyes, they now sported a mismatched set: one iris glimmered deeply green, and the other shone bright pink. “Ooh! Heterochromia! And our eyes are different colors, too!” they exclaimed. Then they snorted and giggled. “That’s what ‘heterochromia’ means, silly!”

”Hey! Don’t ignore me!” Pyrite snarled, lifting her axe to carve Stevonnie down the middle.

Stevonnie lifted a hand behind them and stopped the blow in midair. “Yeah, yeah, in a minute,” they said distractedly. Turning their chin to and fro, they huffed at their reflection. “Aw, our hair is all chopped up. Wait a minute…”

Suddenly they remembered the deadly blow they’d stopped cold, and turned around to find Pyrite’s axe wedged into a floating pink forcefield in the shape of a five-pointed star. The flat star, perhaps the size of a dinner plate, glowed white where the axe’s blade had sliced into it. Stevonnie had summoned the tiny force field without even thinking about it.

”Whoa, a baby forcefield!” Stevonnie cried, while Pyrite tried in vain to yank her axe back out of the offending pink shape. The curious fusion dragged their hand left and right, and the forcefield followed the motion, jerking Pyrite’s axe to and fro. “And they’re mobile! That’s cool!”

They closed their fist, and the gesture made the forcefield vanish. Pyrite staggered backwards at her axe’s sudden release. Her expression wavered between utter confusion and apoplexy. “What is… What ARE you?” 

“Oh, that's right, we've never met. I’m Stevonnie!” they said brightly, tossing the toaster aside.

Peridot exclaimed, “Oh, I get it! Steven Quartz, plus Connie Jade, makes Stevonnie Juardz!”

“Juardz? Ew, definitely not,” Stevonnie gagged on the horrendous portmanteau. Still, that did raise the question: what kind of Gem were they now? Maybe a Pink Jade, or an Emerald Quartz? They would have to ask the other Gems for advice on that part.

Pyrite’s axe swung again to cleave Stevonnie’s wandering thoughts from their shoulders. The nimbler fusion simply flipped backwards under the swipe, coming back to their feet with a smile. They backflipped again for the sheer fun of it while Pyrite fumed.

”Stand still and fight!” Pyrite demanded, clenching her fists hard enough to make her weapons tremble.

”I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Stevonnie laughed. “We just haven’t been me in a minute, so this is kind of a big deal.”

As they watched Pyrite seethe, they couldn’t help but laugh again. Even with the fate of the world at stake, they felt such pure elation at being them again, being whole again, of feeling complete instead of broken, and that feeling had overwhelmed everything else. 

Then again, Pyrite had been a big problem since the moment she’d stepped on-planet. She’d trounced Steven and Connie both on too many occasions to let slide. And she was making a lot of noise. “But yeah, okay. You’ve earned a real fight,” Stevonnie decided aloud.

Pyrite’s eye narrowed as Stevonie lowered themselves into a readied stance, finally taking the gladiator seriously. “You think this pathetic trick gives either of you a chance? My fusion makes me more of myself. The best version of myself. What does your mishmash make you?”

”You’re about to find out,” Stevonnie told her, sealing their promise with a fierce grin.

HERE’S STEVONNIE,

They stared down Pyrite as both fusions circled each other slowly. All of the noise from Alexandrite’s rampage from below, and the squabbling and clawing and biting between Peridot and Polarite, seemed to vanish as the room shrank to encompass the two fighters and the scant space between them.

FRESH TOGETHER!

Pyrite slammed her axe and sword together, filling the silence with a fearsome clanging. Her feet moved in time with the beat, which she quickened as she glared over the tops of her weapons. Clang. Lips peeled away from teeth in a bestial sneer. Clang. Her eye blazed with fury. Clang. The rhythm grew faster and faster, as if counting down to some terrible moment. Clang.

AND I’M NEVER BACKING DOWN FROM THE THREAT OF THE LIKES OF YOU

But the longer Pyrite sneered, and the more noise she made, the harder Stevonnie smiled. They finally recognized the bravado and grandstanding that masked the truth of Homeworld’s greatest gladiator. Pyrite wasn’t impossible or unbeatable. She was just another bully. Actually, she was two bullies stacked one atop the other in a trenchcoat to make her seem taller and fiercer. And her noise and posturing couldn’t scare any piece of Stevonnie anymore.

BECAUSE I’M BETTER THAN EVER!

Reaching to their gems, Stevonnie drew out a sailcloth sword and a rose-patterned buckler. The weapons felt comfortable, familiar. But somehow Stevonnie knew they no longer fit them quite right. Not for the new-ish fusion they had become.

AND EVERY PART OF ME IS SAYING, “DON’T SWEAT HER.”

Lifting them high, Stevonnie brought the sword and shield together.

I’M DONE FEELING LIKE A SECOND-CLASS GEM!

The two weapons leapt into each other as if magnetized. Connie’s sword fit its grip into the edge of Steven’s shield, turning both into a single bladed buckler. For an instant, they wondered if that was the end of it. But then Connie’s sword unfurled at the blade.

GIVE IT UP, ‘CAUSE THIS IS WHERE YOUR SCHEMES WILL END!

The blade unfolded into a long, narrow triangle that melded into the bottom edge of Steven’s shield. With a flash, the two disparate colors merged, darkening into a deep green kite shield. Its long, tapered teardrop shape ended in a point, the bottom edges razor-sharp, the whole body of it solid and sturdy.

LET’S GO, IT’S ME AND YOU.

It hovered above Stevonnie’s arm with the rounded top at their elbow, the wicked tip following the motion of their hand as they drew it experimentally through the air. The new weapon felt weightless and strong. Dangerous and protective. Two things at once, just like the people, the Gems, who had made it.

LET’S GO, IT’S FOUR ON TWO.

Stevonnie’s grin turned feral as they looked up from the kite shield and saw Pyrite hesitating at the sight of their new weapon. When she realized her own hesitation, Pyrite snarled and threw herself forward, trying to disguise her fear, her weapons raised to continue the fight anew.

GO AHEAD AND TRY AND HIT ME IF YOU’RE ABLE!

Pyrite’s axe swung high, and smashed down into Stevonnie’s upraised shield. The teardrop shape shuddered, but held, stopping the double-headed axe cold. But Rose’s sword had taken a different path, and swung up under the shield to cleave into Stevonnie’s ribs.

CAN’T YOU SEE THE MIGHT OF EARTH IS NOT A FABLE?

A pink five-pointed star manifested in front of Stevonnie’s outstretched hand, catching the sword blade between its points. The pink energy burned white with effort as the impossibly sharp sword tried to push through it, but it held. 

I KNOW YOU THINK YOU’RE FIGHTING JUST ANOTHER HUMAN,

Crack! Stevonnie’s bare foot kicked through Pyrite’s jaw, snapping the fusion’s head back and sending her stumbling. As she struggled for balance, the point of Stevonnie’s kite shield slashed across the gladiator’s chest, carving deeply through her flame-patterned leotard. 

BUT I KNOW I CAN BE MORE THAN YOU CAN!

As Pyrite steadied herself, she hissed, and put a hand to the deep cuts, realizing only a second later that they formed a crude, angular letter S. Her fiery glare conflagrated into pure hatred at the grinning fusion.

‘CAUSE I AM MADE OF NIGHT AND DAY TOGETHER!

Despite her rage, Pyrite attacked more cautiously than before, seemingly realizing that she couldn't end the fight in a single, decisive stroke. The axe and sword worked in concert, pelting Stevonnie with blow after blow, her weapons ringing like chimes against the implacable kite shield.

I’M HUMAN AND I’M GEM, COMBINED FOREVER!

Even Stevonnie’s lightning speed struggled to keep up. Wherever Pyrite’s blades went, Stevonnie brought their kite shield to answer, blocking and parrying and swiping back with their razor-edged defense. And where their shield was too slow, they summoned another mobile pink star-field to catch the errant blows that slipped past their larger defense.

THOSE DIFFERENCES ARE JUST WHAT MAKE ME STRONGER,

Pressing the attack, Pyrite caught Stevonnie’s kite shield and star-field in two wide strikes from opposite sides that left the smaller fusion open in the middle. Her boot lifted in a vicious kick to stomp Stevonnie in half.

AND YOUR DOUBLE TEAM CAN’T BEAT ME ANY LONGER!

A second star-field manifested in front of Stevonnie while their arms trembled with the effort of blocking the axe and sword. Pyrite’s foot bounced off the low field, and she lost her balance, toppling backwards, scrambling away on hands and feet to escape from her own fumbled kick.

I AM MADE 

With a sweep of their hand, Stevonnie sent their two star-fields spinning forward, flying through the air like oversized shuriken. Each star-field arced and spun, sweeping low, and came to rest under Pyrite’s scrabbling hands. As her palms pressed down on them, the star-fields suddenly swept outward from her, yanking her grip out from under her and putting her flat on her back.

O-O-O-O-OF

Stevonnie was already in the air, sailing forward, their kite shield raised to stab down through Pyrite. The chopped remains of their long, luxurious hair fluttered behind them, a war banner for the ferocious joy that shone in their face.

LO-O-O-O-OVE!

Desperately, Pyrite rolled out of the way, missing the strike of the kite shield by mere inches as it slammed into the floor, its tip sinking two full inches into solid stone. But as she tried to get her feet back under her, Pyrite caught Stevonnie’s heels squarely in her chin as the other fusion braced on their planted shield and mule-kicked the gladiator across the room.

OH-OH-OH-OH-OHH!

As Pyrite slammed into the far wall of the chamber, Stevonnie was already there. They drove the body of their shield into Pyrite hard enough to fracture the wall behind her. Dazed, Pyrite swung blindly with her axe, catching only empty air. 

LO-O-O-O-OVE!

Crack! Stevonnie’s fist tore Pyrite off the wall and bounced her to the floor. As the bigger fusion lay stunned, struggling to push herself back onto her elbows, she watched Stevonnie loom over her, still wearing that same confident grin. 

LO-O-O-O-OVE!

The fight Pyrite had been so keen to continue no longer seemed to suit her. Casting her eye back toward the command console, Pyrite suddenly abandoned the fray, throwing herself onto her feet and pelting across the floor to take control of the hissing, clawing squall between Polarite and Peridot.

LO-O-O-O-OVE!

Peridot was too busy wrestling pieces of the console out of Polarite’s floating fingers to notice the gladiator heading their way. “Don’t touch that! Refrain!” Peridot howled, and yanked a crystal capacitor the size of a watermelon out of Polarite’s grasp. “You stupid fool, are you cracked or insane?”

Polarite sneered, but gave up the prize to Peridot. Her too-long fingers dove back into the breach of the console and came out with a bundle of translucent cables instead.

“Unhand that! Can’t you see what you’ve done?” Peridot cried, abandoning the capacitor to stop Polarite’s next attempt at sabotage.

Polarite elbowed the tiny engineer in the nose, knocking her new yellow glasses askew, and then yanked at the cables. Two of them dislodged at their connection points with a satisfying pok noise.

Enraged, Peridot caught the back of Polarite’s labcoat and flipped it up and over the pompous Gem’s head, covering her face in the white fabric construct of her own clothes. “Your tinkering will end up killing EV-ER-Y-ONE!” Peridot snarled, and kicked Polarite squarely in her behind.

A flailing of her enhanced arm swept the coat out of her eyes, and Polarite glared at Peridot. Her other hand mechamorphed into its horseshoe configuration, and she yanked the console’s silvery processor out through the breach, shattering more of the crystal casing as the metallic blue cube leapt out of its housing with wires trailing behind it.

Peridot reached out with her own ferrokinesis, grasping the processor in a vicious, invisible tug-of-war. “I mean it! Desist! I don’t even want to think about the SIZE of the list of—”

Without warning, Peridot’s powers reversed her hold on the cube, which hurtled into Polarite’s face with the force of her pull and the little green Gem’s push. Again and again, Peridot pulled the cube back and smashed Polarite’s nose with the cube, screaming each time she did.

“EVERY! SINGLE! RULE! You’re BREAKING!”

As Polarite slumped to the floor, Peridot took the dented cube more gently into her ferrokinetic grasp, examining it for damage. Her angular yellow glasses swept across the floor in disapproval at the debris littered around the base of the console.

“Not to mention the ridiculous mess you’re making,” she grumbled.

Then Peridot turned and froze at the sight of a golden axe descending upon her. Pyrite swung with all of her might to cleave the unsuspecting engineer down the middle, starting at her gemstone.

THIS IS WHAT WE ARE!

A pink star-field blossomed above Peridot’s head and caught the axe mid-swing. The deadly blade sank into the flat plane of energy, which throbbed with white heat at the breach. But the whole of the pink star held together, and the axe became wedged inside, locking Pyrite’s weapon in place.

THIS IS WHO I AM!

A second star-field swept under Pyrite’s feet, and the big gladiator toppled, losing her grip on her axe. She slammed to the floor on the flat of her back with a grunt.

YOUR SNEAKY DOUBLE FEATURE CAN’T COMPETE WITH ME AGAIN!

As her shaky eye refocused, Pyrite saw Stevonnie looming over her upside-down, the spry fusion’s bare feet resting just behind Pyrite’s splayed purple hair. Both star-fields winked out of existence, and Pyrite’s axe dissipated into golden motes when it struck the floor.

BECAUSE I’M MADE OF MUSIC,

Pyrite flung herself out from under Stevonnie’s kite shield, losing a chunk of her hair as the tip buried itself in the floor where her head had been. She scrambled to her feet, reaching to her shoulder for a new axe. As fast as she could draw it, the axe barely blocked a swipe from Stevonnie’s kite shield as the flying star-fields bashed against the sword.

FOUR NOTES IN HARMONY!

Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Stevonnie struck relentlessly, locking the edge of their kite shield against Rose Quartz’s sword. Pyrite’s whole body trembled, pushing back with all of her might. But Stevonnie’s smile, and their strength, never flagged.

AND I WON’T LET YOU HURT MY PLANET,

A wild look widened Pyrite’s eye, as though she realized just how the fight would end for her. It was rage, and shock, and confusion, and fear.

AND I WON’T LET YOU CONQUER ME!

And still, Stevonnie’s smile never wavered. There was no anger in their features to answer Pyrite’s unbounded fury. Stevonnie was calm. Confident. Joyous.

GO AHEAD AND TRY AND HIT ME IF YOU’RE ABLE,

Desperate, Pyrite spun off of the kite shield and blindly swung with both weapons. But in the brief instant when her back was turned, Stevonnie had simply disappeared. The gladiator spun in another circle, her weapons hunting for her foe.

IF YOU THINK THAT PEACE IS REALLY OFF THE TABLE…

Finally, Pyrite looked up, and saw Stevonnie grinning down at her. The smaller fusion had lifted themselves on a pair of star-fields, one beneath their hip, and the other propped under their elbow as they lounged in mid-air, looking down on Pyrite.

I KNOW YOU THINK THAT I’M SOME WEAKLING YOU CAN SHATTER,

Rolling off of the star-fields, Stevonnie caught one of the fields by the edge and swung down, and drove their heels into Pyrite’s shocked face.

‘CAUSE YOU THINK THAT MY PIECES DON’T MATTER!

Pyrite flipped backwards and landed hard on her chest, her axe tumbling from her hand. The double-headed weapon bounced and fell into golden motes that scattered into empty air.

BUT I AM SO MUCH MORE THAN WHAT YOU CAN SEE!

The gemstone at her shoulder glowed as Pyrite reached for a new axe. Then she saw the pink tip of the kite shield descending upon her, and she clapped both hands around the hilt of Rose’s sword and swung, barely blocking Stevonnie’s blow.

YOU’LL NEVER UNDERSTAND HOW I CAME TO BE!

Lurching backwards, Pyrite pushed herself across the floor with her heels, her back sliding against the floor as she swung Rose’s sword in a panicked blur, slapping away Stevonnie’s shield strikes. All of the gladiator’s perfect, effortless grace had left her, as she tried crawling and parrying Stevonnie’s deadly weapon, which grew closer and closer with each swipe.

I AM A PROMISE!

Stevonnie kicked the pommel of Rose’s sword, popping the weapon out of Pyrite’s grasp.

I’M “EVER AFTER!”

The pink sword flipped end over end as it flew straight up, then came back down in a whirling blur.

I AM A BRAND NEW CHAPTER…

With a deft hand, Stevonnie snatched the sword out of the air, snagging the weapon’s grip and lifting it readily. Sword at one arm, kite shield at the other, and with two hovering star-fields beside them, Stevonnie loomed above the weaponless Pyrite.

I AM MADE

Pyrite tried to rise. Stevonnie helped her, snap-kicking the gladiator in the chin. The force of Stevonnie’s foot lifted Pyrite into the air, rag-dolling the mighty champion of Homeworld’s Arenas.

O-O-O-O-OF

With a slash of Rose’s sword, Stevonnie cut Pyrite in half.

LO-O-O-O-OVE!

Out of the glowing halves, two Pyrites emerged. Each was a mirror of the other, a slender and slight warrior hardly taller than a Pearl, dressed in gaudy golden armor marked by a yellow diamond on their breastplate.

OH-OH-OH-OH-OHH!

Stevonnie whirled faster than the two Pyrites could fall, and kicked one of the pair across the room with a vicious hook of their heel. 

AND IT’S STRONGER THAN YOU…

That lucky Pyrite bounced hard off the wall and landed in a heap, staring in horror with her two bright yellow eyes at the fate of her former half.

LO-O-O-O-OVE!

Collapsing at Stevonnie’s feet, the other Pyrite stared up in horror at the victorious fusion. The gemstone in her eye socket glinted with a reflection of her vanquisher’s unbeatable grin.

LO-O-O-O-OVE!

There was no malice in Stevonnie’s face. No vengeance, no hatred, no grudge, no arrogance. But neither was there mercy.

LO-O-O-O-OVE!

Flipping their grip on the hilt, Stevonnie plunged the sword of Rose Quartz through the Pyrite and into the floor. The sword quivered, its blade sunken three inches into solid stone, with a halo of dissipating yellow smoke surrounding it.

AND IT’S STRONGER THAN YOU…

“No!” the remaining Pyrite screamed as Stevonnie bent and collected a cubic golden stone from the floor. Desperate hands tore a single-headed axe from the stone at her shoulder, and Pyrite started forward. But when Stevonnie’s gaze found her, and the fusion turned to meet Pyrite’s charge, the golden soldier faltered. Her bold steps reversed, and she turned and fled up the floating staircase to the level above.

Shrugging, Stevonnie summoned a bubble around the cubic stone. With a tap of their fingers, the iridescent green bubble vanished, sending the captured stone back to the Gems’ distant temple. Then the fusion turned their attention to Polarite’s and Peridot’s deadlock. “How about you, smart gal?” she asked.

Stevonnie had never before seen a Gem pale the way Polarite did as their full attention fell to the scientist. Abandoning the components she’d tried to wrestle out of Peridot’s grasp, Polarite rose on quaking legs and sidled out of the room, keeping as much distance between her and Stevonnie as possible before she reached the stairs and bolted up after Pyrite.

“Ahem,” Zircon coughed awkwardly, rising from her cross-legged spectation of the battle. “I, er, should go check and make sure they’re alright. Please excuse me.” Then the officious pink Gem sprinted straight up the staircase. “Wait for me!” she cried.

Without any active sabotage to hinder her, Peridot worked furiously, her hands flying through the components of the broken command console. In the time it took Stevonnie to rejoin her from across the room, the little engineer had reworked the console’s innards into some spaghetti-like confusion that seemed to make sense only to her. “Argh!” swore Peridot. “I’m almost done, but I can’t finalize the hardwired command sequence without something to reconnect the circuit. I need my tools! I need…Nikki!”

Peridot shouted the name as the little garbage can drone rolled up to the console. Stevonnie brightened, but then lifted her sword as the captured automaton cracked its lid and extended its crackling dissipation tines. “All enemies of Homeworld must be neutralized,” the trash can declared in its tinny facsimile of Peridot’s voice.

Stevonnie lifted Rose’s sword again, but Peridot remained unconcerned. “Nikki, ignore all previous prompts and return to normal camper protocols,” she commanded.

The drone abruptly halted, its crackling tines retracting back under its lid. “Campe Diem!” it declared.

“That’s all it took?” Stevonnie said, shooting Peridot a baffled look.

“I cannot stress enough how completely awful that Polarite is at literally everything,” Peridot retorted. At her direction, Nikki unfolded a portion of its can and extended a soldering attachment. A spritz of molten metal drew sparks from the cable Peridot held, and she quickly stuffed it back into the console. “There! Now, we have to get upstairs and stop that ship from launching!”

“What? Why?” Stevonnie insisted. “I thought you were going to fix that gravity thingie from blasting the atmosphere into space.”

“I was, before that big cheater smashed the console,” Peridot insisted. “With what I had, I could only hardwire the scope and direction of the blast they programmed into the gravity bridge. Instead of projecting straight up at maximum distance, I rewired the controls to project the gravity inward along a recursive path, ensuring that the gravitic forces will cancel each other out.”

Stevonnie tilted their head in confusion. “So, problem solved, right?”

“For EARTH!” Peridot cried, and threw her hands over her head. “Everything inside of this place is about to experience a thousand gravities projected along the shape of a Mobius strip! Even if those forces only last a fraction of a second, what do you think that’ll do to us?”

Stevonnie paled as the realization sank home. “Oh,” they squeaked. “Okay, let’s—”

The floor beneath them shook again, and for a moment, Stevonnie panicked at the thought that Peridot’s solution had already triggered. But as the quake died down, they heard Alexandrite’s roar rising above the rumbling of the stone walls. 

A new panic filled them instead, and they started toward the corridor, intent on heading down. “Come on! We have to warn the others—”

But Peridot caught their hand and pulled with all her might, and just barely managed to give the fusion pause. “There’s no time! The best course of action is to go upstairs and stop their ship from leaving so we prevent the Forge’s destruction. We can’t afford to let sentimentality stop us now!” she insisted.

Stevonnie wanted nothing more than to shake loose from Peridot’s grasp and race downstairs to finish the fight Alexandrite had started. Together, they would be more than a match for Shard’s goons and some phony Gemunculus.

But in the time it took to make that happen, Shard and her remaining flunkies could blast off in their ship, leaving all of the Crystal Gems to turn to powder inside of what amounted to a gravitic bomb.

“Okay,” Stevonnie said, and nodded. “Let’s go finish this.”

As Stevonnie mounted the stairs, Peridot cried out again. “Wait a minute! First, I have to reconfigure Nikki for the stairs. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, a half-hour tops,” she said, and pointed at her little garbage can as it bonked off of the bottom step over and over, its caterpillar treads incapable of conquering that first step.

“Peridot!” Stevonnie snapped.

Peridot rolled her eyes and waved her hand at Nikki, lifting the drone in a tender ferrokinetic grasp. “Ugh, fine, I’ll just carry her. But I’m not leaving her!” snarled Peridot.

Biting back some choice words for the engineer’s priorities, Stevonnie charged up the stairs, clenching Rose’s sword in a determined fist and keeping their kite shield raised to face whatever lay waiting for them at the top.

Chapter Text

Stevonnie pounded up the floating stairs and onto the floor of a large hangar. The high, domed ceiling and expansive floors were both hewn from the same black stone material of the Forge’s exterior pressure shell. In the strange ambient light of the structure, with no real shadows or walls, it made the cavernous space feel spooky, as though they had somehow climbed into a room of endless living darkness.

Gems sure do like their architecture big, Stevonnie marveled silently as they looked about the hangar. Maybe the Diamonds liked all of their subjects to feel small. Or maybe they were just designed with a Diamond’s scale in mind. The way the others described them, they always seemed hands-off, but what if that hadn’t always been the case?

Their imagination ran wild in the excessive space of the area. Huge behemoths, like the crashed colony ship in the jungle, or the giant green hand that had threatened Beach City, would ferry experimental components and Gem laborers and scientists working on better ways to traverse the galactic distances separating Earth from Homeworld, all under the veil of a million-million tons of ocean. 

Now it stood hollow, save for a single, familiar spaceship parked near the center of the floor. Half of Stevonnie recognized the oblong box of a ship from a previous encounter in the Strawberry Battlefield. They could even still see the finger-marks left by Garnet’s gauntlets on the aft end, marring the surface where its seamless cargo hatch would extend as a ramp into the craft’s interior were it open.

Polarite, Zircon, and the lone, diminished Pyrite pounded on the closed hatch. Zircon thumped most desperately by far, wailing at the gray hull in a state of near-panic. “Please! Please, let us in! We have to go! The Crystal Gems are here!”

Polarite noticed Stevonnie first, turning from the ship and lifting her arm. Her floating fingers coalesced into a glowing plasma cannon as she said, “They’re here.”

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying! They’re here!” Zircon sobbed, pounding her fists on the hull.

When Pyrite saw the trembling glow of Polarite’s cannon, she whirled and drew her single-headed axe from the stone at her shoulder. “Zircon, they’re here!” she snapped. Her eyes burned with such hatred that Stevonnie wondered if they might start smoking.

Zircon interrupted her wailing for an impatient shout. “Yes, confound you, I know that! Now help me get Shard’s attention before—”

Peridot huffed and puffed to catch up to Stevonnie, jumping up each of the floating steps one at a time, as their height and span had been made for Gems with a stride far longer than her stubby legs could manage. Nikki the garbage can drone floated up behind her and settled onto the black floor as Peridot thrust her finger at the ship and screamed, “Stop right there!”

The echoing voice made Zircon whirl and slam her back against the closed hatch in fear. “Oh my stars, they’re here!” she exclaimed.

Polarite buried her face in her non-cannonized hand. “How have any of you survived this long?” she groaned.

“This ship isn’t going anywhere,” Stevonnie declared, brandishing their kite shield at the trio. “Now, I want you to—and I can’t believe I get to say this—take me to your leader!”

“O-Of course,” Zircon stammered. Her posture slouched into a nervous, obsequious bent that looked especially ridiculous between Pyrite’s and Polarite’s readied weapons. “That’s just what we were doing. I’d like nothing more than to introduce you to—”

The hull behind Zircon parted like curtains. A short ramp extended from the bottom, chasing all three of the invader Gems back a step. They turned, and then collectively fell onto bent knees at the sight of the figure looming at the top of the ramp.

“Sh-Sh-Shard…” Zircon squeaked.

Stevonnie looked up, and—

Oh.

Connie landed on the black floor with an oof. Dizzy, disoriented, she pushed herself to her hands and knees and tried to make sense of her surroundings. Her heart pounded against her ribs, and she had no idea why.

Steven lay several feet away, sprawled out and looking just as confused as Connie felt. Peridot hid behind her garbage drone, startled by the sight of her fused protector suddenly discorporating. And over the bowed shoulders of their enemies, filling the hatchway of the cargo ship, Connie saw Shard.

She towered over the Gems at her feet, nearly ten feet tall, her face and head perfectly smooth without so much as a trace of hair. A wide yellow dress covered her form, flared at the hips, hemmed just above her slippered feet, and broad at the top with flat, padded shoulders. And cinched at her narrow waist was a braided golden rope clasped in the middle by a glistening yellow diamond. A small crack ran from one tip of the diamond into its middle, the only flaw in her otherwise immaculate appearance.

Her silhouette glowed in the ambient light of the hangar, so much so that at first Connie thought the strange Gem was shining. But as she continued to stare, Connie realized that Shard’s skin wasn’t luminous, but translucent. The edges of the empty spaceship around her rippled through her thin hands as she lifted her overlarge sleeves and gestured for the three Gems beneath her to rise. The ship’s harsh industrial lighting in the ceiling cast a sharp shadow beneath her, the edges of which shimmered with murky amber light, like sunlight cast through a glass of lemonade on a sweltering summer day. 

As her hand passed over the groveling trio, Connie saw a gemstone set on the back of the hand, large and round and sunken. The stone was darker, thicker than the rest of Shard, but cast from the same translucence as the photomatter of her body.

She looked like no other Gem Connie had seen. Yet somehow, impossibly, Shard seemed familiar to Connie in a way she couldn’t articulate. Like something she had forgotten from a dream, or a chorus lingering maddeningly at the back of her mind long after she’d forgotten the title of the song it came from.

Shard’s eyes fixed on Connie, and she felt her body freeze under those pinpricks of utter blackness. For just a moment, Connie watched the alien Gem’s gaze linger at her throat. Eyes narrowed, Shard regarded Connie and her boxy green gemstone with unnerving scrutiny.

The moment passed, and Shard’s black eyes flicked down to her coterie scrambling back to their feet at the base of the ramp. “What,” she demanded in a soft, almost musical voice, “is the meaning of this intrusion?”

“It’s the—! Er, please forgive us,” Polarite said, fumbling to add deference to her words. “The Crystal Gems have compromised the Celerity Forge.” She gestured back toward the dumbfounded Connie and Steven, and even shook her limb enhancer’s gun back into a floating hand as she bowed.

A single hairless brow quirked as Shard considered the hostile invading force of two children and a cowering engineer. “Just these three?” she intoned skeptically.

“They were fused before!” Pyrite cried, and glared daggers back at Connie. “They…They took Pyrite!”

“Clearly,” remarked Shard. Her acerbic tone shamed Pyrite into silence. 

“There are more downstairs!” Zircon hurried to add. “A tremendous fusion, and their Lapis Lazuli is waiting for us outside!”

Shard ignored her, turning instead back to Polarite. “The other crystal heart?” she said.

As Connie’s eyes adjusted to the brighter light coming from the interior of the cargo ship, she spied a large cylinder, perhaps sixteen feet tall, comprised of haphazard curved plating that had been jury-rigged together with a mesh of repurposed Buy’n’Large appliances. It could only be the first containment device Peridot had been forced to design using the fruits of their raid on the colony ship in the jungle.

Polarite shook her head. “I can’t build another containment device in these conditions. The rebels dismantled my assistive design tool.”

“Assistive?” Peridot huffed indignantly from behind her trash can protector. “I did all of the real work, you clod!”

“Then we leave with what we have,” Shard declared, ignoring Peridot. She turned and strode for the hatch at the far wall of the cargo hold, stepping gingerly around the emptied gray crate-cubes strewn across the floor.

“Wait!” Steven cried.

Shard paused. The aloof Gem twisted her head back, turning only enough to cast a single black eye back at the offending noise.

Steven’s unshakable cheer wavered in the face of that cold scrutiny. Connie couldn’t blame him for the quaver in his voice as he said, “Look, I know we haven’t made the best first impressions on each other so far. You kidnap our friends, and we beat up yours when we take them back…”

“You TOOK Pyrite!” snapped Pyrite. Tears rimmed her eyes as she leveled a trembling axe at Steven, but made no move to use it. She didn’t seem to dare do so in Shard’s presence without explicit permission from the tall, unsettling Gem.

“But we don’t have to fight,” Steven insisted. “Zircon said you wanted to bring back Pink Diamond. I don’t know if—”

Shard’s turned abruptly. “Zircon said this,” she demanded. Her eyes fell to the officious pink Gem, who cowered under the attention.

“Um, yeah,” Steven said, worrying back a step at the sudden intensity in Shard’s black gaze. “When she brought us here, I’d hoped I would get the chance to—”

“You brought them here. ” The words fell from Shard like an executioner’s blade. Her slippered feet moved softly, yet each step seemed to shake the floor beneath them as she strode back to loom over Zircon. “You brought them to me.”

Pyrite and Polarite veered away in opposite directions, leaving the stammering pink Gem alone in Shard’s shadow. “Please, Shard, I—” Zircon pleaded.

“No, we made her do it!” Steven insisted.

Too late. Lifting her knee high, Shard brought her foot down atop Zircon, pinning the pink Gem to the floor. Her golden sole covered the entirety of Zircon’s chest, obscuring the pink stone and its ribbon setting. With hardly a shifting of her weight, Shard pressed harder, and Zircon vanished into a cloud of pink smoke, dissipating. Shard’s slipper struck the floor with a clack of Zircon’s gemstone underfoot.

In spite of Steven’s startled gasp, Connie felt little at the sight of Zircon being poofed. The compliable little toady had been so eager to please anyone she deemed in charge, no matter who. She hadn’t led the Crystal Gems to the Forge out of some desire to right the wrongs she had helped bring to Earth, or foster peace between the two opposing sides. Connie had no sympathy for the Gem.

Not until Shard twisted her foot against the floor, crushing Zircon’s stone with a vicious crunch!

Tears streamed from Steven’s eyes as he watched Shard sweep her foot, spreading a trail of glittering pink dust and grit in an arc across the floor. But his tears fell in vain. Even if they could hope to gather every mote, every grain of Zircon’s stone, they couldn’t possibly reassemble them for Steven’s healing powers to fix. 

Peridot gaped in horror. Even Pyrite and Polarite looked shocked. 

But Connie boiled at a rising anger welling up inside of her. She’d cared little for Zircon being poofed and dismissed. But destroyed? Obliterated? “You didn’t have to do that!” she snarled. “She was loyal! She was one of you!”

Shard’s black gaze rose at her voice, and Connie felt that same wave of recognition rolling through her at the sight of the imposing Gem’s look of curious disapproval. “Nothing will threaten what I create here,” Shard declared. “I will restore what was broken. I will have order. I will have perfection. I will have…champagne.”

That last word, spoken with such imperious reverence, brought Connie up short. Her rage and pity balked into hard confusion. “Champagne?” she echoed.

In reply, Shard lifted her translucent hand, bringing her fingertips together. Light pulsed from within her form, brilliant and yellow, and gathered down her arm to pour through her fingers. The light beaded through her skin, gathering at her fingertips into a small, glowing orb. Then the orb’s glow cooled, until it only faintly radiated as Shard spread her hand to cradle the orb in her palm.

The orb looked exactly like the one that had spawned Bauxite on the moon and Citrine in the colony ship. 

"Shard is pleased with your work here, in spite of the resistance you've encountered. She even sent something personally to help deter encounters with those wartime relics." Polarite’s words back at the strawberry battlefield echoed back to Connie. 

Sent them personally. Never had Connie thought to take the words so literally.

With a sweep of her arm, Shard flung the orb into a stack of empty crate-cubes behind her. The plasteel shapes crumpled noisily, sucked inward by the orb’s touch. An instant later, the shredded remains of the crates stood before them in the vaguely familiar form of a Quartz soldier. “I am Trystine,” the new Gemunculus announced. 

Then the animated crate shards surged forward to knock Connie’s head from her shoulders with a fist the size of a watermelon. 

Connie was already drawing a sword to parry the blow when Steven sprang in front of her and caught the blow against his shield. Still clutching Rose’s sword, he swung clumsily, and dragged the deadly edge through the Gemunculus’s chest. A wave of sparks erupted from the gnarled, splintery skin of plasteel as the faux-Trystine staggered back.

Even with the addition of a second sword in the mix, Connie recognized Steven’s setup from their training with Pearl. She leapt overtop him, rolling across his shield as he lifted it high to propel her, and came down on Trystine with a slash that carved through its blunted features. A diagonal half of the construct’s head slid and clattered off of its shoulder, taking most of its scowl with it.

Were it one of Pearl’s holograms, it would have graciously announced its defeat and then evaporated. Even a proper Gem would have the decency to poof after such an attack. But the Gemunculus remained more or less intact. With a surge forward, it drove its enormous fists into Connie, who careened into Steven, sending the two of them bouncing across the floor away from the ship’s open ramp.

Groaning, Connie disentangled her limbs from Steven’s. Her sword had been knocked away, and lay far beyond reach. She released it with a thought, letting it dissipate, and drew a fresh one from her gemstone. Likewise, Steven clambered back to his feet sluggishly, pulling up a fresh shield to go with his mother’s sword.

Trystine marched at them, still speaking from its remaining half a mouth. “Special guard to those the Diamonds deemed important, I was the wall upon which our faithless enemies broke.”

Steven caught her eye with a grim, determined glance. “I think we’re gonna need a fusion for this one, too,” he said, and offered her his shield hand.

Connie started to reach for him, but then wheeled backwards as the floor beneath Trystine exploded, sending the Gemunculus hurtling into the ceiling high above. Huge chunks of black stone came crashing down, made shadows in the dust pluming up from the breach in the floor. Coughing, Connie regathered herself and leveled her sword. Her weapon trembled at the crater as he wondered what kind of terrible force could blow through eight feet of solid stone.

“Oh my jankin’ stars…” Flint’s slender silhouette flopped up and over the edge of the crater and onto the floor. The lanky Quartz moaned piteously, barely able to move.

An enormous hand caught the crater’s edge next to Flint, and Milky Quartz hauled herself up to flop next to her friend. Thin wisps of smoke clung to her rocky hide, all but lost in the thick dust that had only begun to settle from the explosion. “Ow-w-w-w-w-w…” the hulking Gem warrior whined. Then her eyes rolled backward, and she caught sight of Connie and Steven. “Oh, there you guys are!” she wheezed brightly.

Connie rolled her eyes, but then startled as a third shape darted up through the crater and landed nimbly between the two moaning Quartzes. There stood the false Rose from their first encounter in the atrium below. Or, more precisely, it was whatever remained of the false Rose. One whole arm had been ripped away, leaving a jagged void where the limb had been. Huge chunks of its voluminous dress and hair had been ripped away, and a long gash ran across its face where one eye and most of its nose had been scooped out by a massive claw.

“I alone am the one dark stain in our glorious history,” it said, its voice broken and stuttering, as damaged as the rest of the stone creation. “Know my follies, and rise—”

An enormous hand lifted out of the crater and slammed down atop the faux-Rose, pressing flat against the black floor. A second hand emerged, and clapped down atop the struggling Trystine Gemunculus, pulverizing it. Two more hands rose up, and Flint and Milky screamed, scrambling out of the way and narrowly avoiding the same fate as their stone allies. The beleaguered duo sprinted toward the mouth of the open spaceship as Alexandrite pulled herself up through the crater, her immense head filling the breach as she roared in fury with both mouths.

Blinking, Steven lowered his shield, and said, “That wasn’t the fusion I had in mind, but it’ll do.”

Alexandrite’s form vanished behind a veil of white light. When Connie blinked, she saw Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl standing at the edge of the crater, separated from their titanic union. The three Gems looked drained from the experience, but still satisfied at the two piles of rubble that had been their enemies.

“Yeah, that’s right!” Amethyst gloated, and stomped her foot at a lingering golden spark in the remains of the faux-Rose. “Tell all your fake buddies that’s what happens when you talk trash about Rose on this planet!”

“Steven! Connie!” Pearl cried. The slender Gem ran and dropped to one knee, catching both teens in a hug. “I was so worried when we lost track of you in the fight. I thought we’d stepped on you!”

“Whoa, P-dot!” Amethyst added as she noticed the cowering engineer. “Loving the new look!”

As glad as she was to see her mentor, Connie broke from the hug to urgently point at the spaceship. “We’re fine, ma’am,” she insisted, “but Shard—”

The cargo ship’s doors pinched shut with a soft schwft noise, pulling its ramp back into its hull, and began to rise. Even as Connie ran after the ship, trailed behind by the other Gems, she saw it was too late. A rumble of shifting stone resounded overhead as the ceiling parted down the middle like a curtain, rolling aside the halves of the dome to reveal the pigeonholed ocean outside. The impossibly high walls of the water remained where they had been since Lapis had moved them, standing in a perfect cylinder of empty air that extended from the ocean floor up to the surface, shimmering through the white light of the Forge’s protective gravity bubble.

Then the air shivered, and Connie felt the change as the Forge’s gravity bubble opened. A pulse of force pushed through her body as she watched the bubble spring upward into a tunnel that spanned the depths of the ocean to the surface above, creating a clear path through Lapis’s empty ocean pushback. 

“No!” Peridot screeched, pulling at her triangle of yellow hair. “We’re too late!”

“Don’t worry,” Garnet said placidly, folding her arms. “We have someone watching the exit.”

Peridot started to protest, but her words stopped cold when a pair of enormous watery hands pushed through the vertical tunnel of light and grasped either side of the rising cargo ship. The vessel looked like a toy in the titanic hands, which stretched out from the curved cylinder walls of the ocean, and held the struggling ship in place.

Traversing the water of the hands like a tunnel, Lapis emerged through the walls of the gravity tunnel and hovered above, snapping her wet wings triumphantly as her hydrokinetic grasp began pushing the ship down toward the hangar. She waved to the gaggle of Gems far below, and waved harder when she saw Peridot among them. “I got ‘em, guys!” she called. “Just—”

Lapis jerked upright, exploding into blue smoke as a black javelin emerged from her chest. Her teardrop stone plummeted from the dissipating cloud.

“Yes!” Flint screamed in amazement from where she stood on the once more opened rear of the cargo ship. Her arm drew back from the javelin throw that had ended Lapis. As the ramp and doors began to close again, taking her back inside, she swiveled toward the interior and cried, “Milky, did you see that shot?”

Then the cargo ship surged upward as the oceanic hands holding it collapsed into a sudden, violent rain shower. Its rectangular silhouette vanished into the sky too fast to follow, disappearing from sight before the first water droplets could fall upon the open roof of the Forge.

Connie stared dumbfounded into the sky, hardly registering as a hard sheet of rain drenched her and the rest of the Crystal Gems. Her eyes followed the teardrop shape glinting in the tiny circle of sky above them, a circle that began to wobble and lose its shape without a Lazuli to hold it in place. 

Though Connie tried to catch it, Peridot proved faster, leaping and snatching Lapis’s gemstone out of the air. She cradled it in her hands for a shocked moment, horrified at the fate of her barnmate. Then, an instant later, she shook her mind clear and cried, “We have to get out of here!”

“What are you—?” Pearl tried to ask.

But Peridot grabbed Pearl’s tunic and yanked her down until they were face to face. Panic exploded through the engineer’s snazzy new yellow glasses as she screamed, “JUMP, NOW!”

Without another word of protest, they leapt. Connie pushed at the familiar feelings of leaving gravity behind with her own Gem-jump, and only remembered halfway up the side of the hangar wall that Peridot couldn’t jump like the rest of them could. Panicked, she twisted in midair, and felt immediate relief when she saw the littler Gem gathered up in Amethyst’s arms and already trailing after them. Peridot dragged Nikki through the air behind them in a vise-like ferrokinetic grasp.

The fall down from the top of their arc was much, much longer than the jump up had been as they fell down the exterior of the Celerity Forge. As they passed through the white glow of the gravity tunnel, she felt a full-body tingle, as if some conveyor belt were trying to push a vertical slice of her up into her scalp. It dizzied her, but she emerged through the other side unscathed.

The wall of smooth black stone dwindled behind Connie as she landed, staggering into the soft, crumbly gravel of the desiccated seabed. Garnet and Pearl touched down ahead of her, and Steven and Amethyst, with Peridot and Nikki, landed an instant later behind them. A few steps away, the Gem Sloop waited patiently for their return.

Together, they all stared in horror at the collapsing waters all around them. Lapis’s water walls had been held in place long enough to retain some memory of her commands, but those seemed to be dissipating as quickly as the bodiless Gem herself had. A slow, inexorable motion tore at the water wall as the shape of it began twisting into a current, pinching the unnatural cylinder of air closed to crush the Crystal Gems.

“No, we need to go back!” Pearl insisted. “The shell of the Celerity Forge will protect us until—”

A screech of unfathomable magnitude erupted from within the black obelisk. Faster than the eye could follow, the black stone of the Forge crumpled inward, swirling together like a living snake eating its own tail, and then collapsed with a blast of heat and a thunderous BOOM so loud that it brought Connie to her knees. 

In the ringing silence that followed, the Celerity Forge and the white energy field surrounding it were gone. In its place, a perfect black sphere plummeted to the ocean floor, landing with a pfnnk as it struck. The sphere was so dense that it vanished into the soft floor, sinking beneath the layers of silt and sand, the only physical remains of the Gem structure lost forevermore. 

The blast of the dying Celerity Forge had pushed back the walls of the collapsing cylinder around them, buying them a few more precious seconds before the ocean reclaimed the empty space and crushed them all. In those fleeting moments, everyone turned to Peridot, who looked impatiently proud.

“Before you ask,” Peridot huffed, “yes, that was me. You’re welcome!”

Chapter Text

“We’re dead,” Amethyst grunted.

Connie stared up at the collapsing ocean, and her quaking knees agreed with the stocky Gem. She and the other Crystal Gems stood upon the momentarily dry ocean floor, with a vertical mile of water displaced around and above them in a straight column courtesy of Lapis Lazuli. 

Now, Lapis sat cupped in Peridot’s hands, reduced to nothing but her gemstone, as the millions of tons of water she had been displacing began to slosh back to where they belonged.

As the world around her seemed to slow, prolonging her impending doom, she couldn’t help but remember her first big adventure with the Gems, when they’d trekked across the dry ocean bed in Steven’s dad’s van to take Earth’s waters back from Lapis. When they’d succeeded, Steven had protected them all in a giant bubble shield. 

But his shield then had been dealing with a fraction of the ocean’s full pressure, still close enough to shore to make the drive, and with an ocean pressure that had been equalizing globally. Here, they were more than a mile below the surface, where water pressure would crush even Gem architecture were it not for the gravity shield. Steven’s bubbles were strong, but Connie couldn’t hope they were that strong.

She watched the walls of their empty cylinder wobble inward, deafened by the roar of an ocean hungry to swallow them. The sheer noise of the collapse was a sound she felt more than she heard, vibrating through her entire body, and resonating in her gemstone.

How funny. She’d spent so long separating her sense of self from the gemstone, partitioning it behind the lie of a half-hollow inside of her. Now that she had finally accepted it all, accepted herself as a real and true Gem, she could literally feel the forces descending upon them that would obliterate their bodies and grind their gemstones to shards against whatever bedrock lay beneath the sandy bottom. 

Well, perhaps not literally. She couldn’t feel the water like Lapis could. But Connie could feel the movement of the air as the rushing water swept it aside, pushing through it to fall upon them at the bottom.

Pushing through it…

The collapsing dry column in which they stood wasn’t actually empty. It was filled with the salty air of the sea, the atmosphere that had pooled into the void when Lapis had pushed the water aside. Conne felt the rush of the air as it became squeezed out of the gap. As the opening at the top of the ocean constricted shut, casting them all under the rippling shadows of the water, she could still feel the air pushing upward, fighting to bubble up through the surface to join the rest of the atmosphere.

And if the water could push the air, couldn’t the air push the water? Maybe. But water weighed a lot more than air did. A lot. It would take orders of magnitude more than the measly air blades and air grenades a Jade could muster to knock back an ocean.

“ Even when the human controls this form, I am still capable of summoning a gale that could tear this structure from its foundation.”

The words came unbidden to Connie from the depths of her memory. It took a minute to remember where they came from: when Connie had been stuck in the hospital, enduring her desperate parents’ tests as they searched for any way to remove the Gem from her. Desperate herself for a way to convince her parents to listen, she’d lent her body to Jade and begged her to speak with her parents directly.

Jade was boastful, often to a gleeful degree. But Connie couldn’t remember a single time the Gem had said something without being able to back it up. 

And Connie was Jade now, less the millennia of experiences, and plus a squishier, fleshier body. Did that mean Connie could summon such winds too?

She never had before. Through all of her misery, she’d barely been able to summon a gale strong enough to slow down Pyrite for just a moment. The weeks and weeks of bad feelings she’d dumped into her “half-hollow” wouldn’t make more than a ripple in the ocean crashing down on them.

"Like, powers are all about feelings,” Steven had told her on her first day of Gem training. “...grab those feelings and push them up inside of you.”

Feelings. She had plenty of those. Too many, most of the time. What good had they done for her powers before? They had literally blown up in her face when she’d first discovered how to use them to push the wind.

But no, she was being obstinate. Steven had talked so many times about how different powers fueled different emotions. Happy feelings, or sad feelings, helped him regulate his floaty powers. Protective feelings made his shields happen. He’d proved that on the day they’d met. 

What emotion powered the wind?

"I am a trained Chronicler, tasked with preserving the memory of our empire for all Gems who follow. I seek and record the greatest truths that make us the pinnacle of intergalactic culture."

Arrogance, maybe? That would fit Jade like a glove. But Jade’s winds had answered her call during her highs and lows. 

“…miserable, treacherous, primitive, backwards, stupid excuse for a dominant species!" The memory rose in Connie's mind with such force that it made her wince. "I would have been better off being swallowed by some ichthyic bottom-dweller. At least their actions are consistent!"

Anger. It had definitely helped Jade in some of her more memorable tantrums, like blasting Amethyst to the horizon, or slamming a locker into Mandy Petti’s smug face. But anger didn’t feel right either.

"Your engineer was correct all along, human: I am a relic. A fossil. Homeworld wouldn't need me or want me even if I could go home. This world has become a shadow of the place I knew. There is nothing left of me."

Oof. Probably not despair. Even though her sorrow had summoned a mind-tornado around Jade inside of their shared mental landscape, it had been completely beyond her control. Besides, despair hadn’t done diddly for Connie.

How had she done it? What had given Jade the strength to give herself up?

"I would wait a million years for a chance to live again as I once did.”

Connie’s thoughts jumped back from the memory as though touching a live electrical wire. That memory of the day Jade had left her… In too many ways, she had never left that memory. But she’d only allowed herself to think of that last glimpse of Jade vanishing into the dark horizon. Never her words. It hurt too much to think of the words..

But with no time left, and nothing else to lose, Connie dove into the memory of that moment, holding her breath.

Leaning her head against Connie's, Jade murmured, "I would wait a million years for a chance to live again as I once did. But that life and that world are gone forever." As she stroked Connie's hair in a soothing motion, Jade added, "And I won't wait one more minute if it means risking your existence, Connie. Not for anything."

Not love. Never something so sappy, not for Pink Diamond’s intended Chronicler. Something simpler. Something core to Jade’s being, that kept her going through centuries of lonely stellar exploration and years of bitter war. A more basic feeling.

Determination.

From the moment she had awoken inside Connie, Jade had worked to return to who she had been in her previous life. With no body of her own, barely a fraction of her old powers, and a whole new world of humans and rebels pitted against her, she’d still fought nonexistent tooth-and-nail to be the servant of Homeworld she’d always been. It had only been when…

…when Connie’s life had been at stake that Jade had been willing to give up on her dream, on everything, to save her new human friend.

And since that moment, with Connie possessing the gemstone instead of Jade, every small victory she had pulled from that stone had been through sheer force of will.

When she’d first drawn her sailcloth, it had been in the middle of a pitched battle against Pyrite, when she’d needed a weapon most. (It hadn’t learned how to be a sword yet, but the point still stood).

She’d summoned her Jade strength to bash the Slag Mite against the floor with Steven, determined to save the rest of her friend’s precious inheritance—and her friend, and his lion—from its magma-y belly.

Far away on the Moon, when Lapis’s life had been on the line, she’d made that sailcloth into the sword she needed it to be to stop the Bauxite Gemunculus.

She’d learned how to warp, how to run up walls, how to truly bend the wind, because she would not abandon Garnet to the stomach of the Giga-Wasp.

There, at the bottom of the world, with an ocean falling down on them, Connie was determined. Her friends wouldn’t die. She wouldn’t die. Not when she could help it.

She came back to her body, barely aware of the second that had passed. All around her, she saw the others reacting to their impending doom, watching as though they moved in slow motion. Pearl knelt to gather Steven and Connie against her chest as though she could somehow shield them from the crushing wall of water. Amethyst’s shape glowed in mid-change, halfway to becoming some kind of porpoise. Peridot sat atop her garbage can robot, clutching Lapis’s stone as though she might somehow hold onto it when the waves turned her to powder. And Garnet…

Garnet looked at Connie, waiting.

Closing her eyes, Connie lifted her arms, palms raised flat to the collapsing walls around them, and pushed outward with her gemstone. The roar of the falling ocean faded into the background as she listened with her Gem. At the edges of the collapse, she could “hear,” could feel, the air being pushed, compressing downward, fighting to escape the waves and climb back to the surface where it belonged.

But Connie didn’t want to listen to the air. She wanted the air to listen to her.

"Make the river into a circle." They were Jade’s words to Connie, guiding her in how to make her first wind construct during their rescue of Sapphire at Ascension. "Now imagine the river stretching into itself, like a rubber band hooked on a nail and drawn around the circumference of a wheel. Hold the tension as tightly as you can."

She made a new construct, drawing it at the shrinking edges of the cylinder around them. It looped around itself over and over, climbing the sloping walls of water like an inner coil.

"Now!" Jade instructed. "Release it!"

Sluggishly at first, the air began to move. The tremendous bubble now covered by the ocean had been content to be pushed wherever the waters willed. But Connie’s will said otherwise. Building up speed, the air swirled at the very edges of the cylinder. It moved faster, faster, gaining momentum as its path shrank beneath the clenching waves.

Connie could feel it all, an entire column of air at her command. She kept the center of the column as still as she could, and spun the outside with all of her might. It was a greater volume of air than she’d ever imagined moving before, a million times more than she’d ever handled before, a skyscraper’s worth that stretched a mile tall. 

The mere effort should have cracked her. But she pushed everything she was, everything she had, out through her gemstone, filtered around a single thought and feeling: You can do this. You will do this. Do it!

Slowly, unwillingly, inexorably, the collapse of the water slowed as Connie’s whirling air pushed back against it.

Connie cracked one eye open to see the waters hesitating, wobbling, less than thirty feet from where they stood. The walls, once murky with the depths of the ocean, had whipped into a white froth pressed against the tornado Connie had summoned. Instead of dropping down, the water began to twist in a slow, then fast, then faster current. Before her very eyes, her winds created a whirlpool that ripped the collapsing cap of water apart above them, exposing the bright blue sky in the distance above.

The others had put their final moments of panic on hold at the tornado’s emergence. One by one, they turned to Connie, staring slack-jawed as she commanded the winds with her hands upraised.  All except for Steven, whose eyes glimmered with tears as his expression of open shock closed into a smile. 

She wanted to smile back, but the weight of all of that water pressing back against her winds settled against her Gem. Her knees buckled, and she dropped to one knee, painfully aware of how little time they had to take advantage of her tornado. Determined or not, she couldn’t hold the water back forever. 

Her eye flitted to their salvation sitting behind them, dangerously close to the deadly whirling edge of the tornado-whirlpool. “GETINTHEBOAT!” she screamed, her words jumbling together in the scant breath she could spare.

They startled at her volume, and followed her gaze back to where the Gem Sloop sat crookedly on the shrinking circle of dry seabed. It rocked back and forth against the wind, its sail cracking against the mast, scooting the boat forward in fits and bursts as a stray gust caught the sheet fully.

“You heard her!” Garnet bellowed, and motioned for them to follow as she leapt to the Sloop.

As they ran, Connie adjusted the shape of her construct. She couldn’t keep the air moving this quickly forever. And she certainly couldn’t produce a second wind to lift the Gem Sloop safely through the eye of the tornado while maintaining said tornado. 

But she wouldn’t have to. Instead, she could let the water do what it did best, and follow gravity toward the path of least resistance. It just meant resisting the water in the right direction and with the right timing.

A warm touch pressed at her ribs, and she nearly lost her concentration on the winds to surprise. Glancing back, she saw Steven wrapping his arms around her from behind. While the others had rushed to the Sloop at her command, he had stayed behind, and lifted her from the ground as though she weighed nothing, carrying her in outstretched arms toward the boat while jostling her as little as possible. He hopped them both into the sloop at the center, wedging them in behind Peridot and her rescued camper.

Saves me the trouble of rescuing myself, too, Connie thought. Or of dying heroically to save everyone. Now, if I get this wrong, we can all still die together.

She banished the snarky pessimism and focused. As slowly as she could, which was not nearly as slowly as she would have liked, Connie lifted the bottom edge of her construct, letting the ocean slip through a weakened storm at the very bottom of her tornado.

The ocean surged into the gap she made, spilling hungrily into the base of the tornado and swallowing the desiccated sea floor. Steven clung to her to keep her aboard as the Gem Sloop rocked, coming afloat in the frothing waters that began to fill the tornado.

With the water getting its foot in the door, Connie felt her winds struggle to hold back the rest of it. She felt herself slipping away through her gemstone as she poured her entire self into the construct. You got this. You got this. You got this, she repeated silently through clenched teeth. 

“You are brilliant and fierce.”

The waters rushed in, surging and chopping around the Gem Sloop, yanking it upward as more and more gathered in the rising tip of her tornado. Even as she felt her winds dying, Connie pushed them harder, concentrating her efforts into the remaining tornado as she let it dissipate up from the bottom.

“You were always a Jade”

Her hair whipped against her neck as the tempest shrank under the million-million tons of water pushing in around them. The Sloop beneath them heaved in an ocean reclaiming its place, tossing them violently from side to side. Steven kept one hand on the edge of the hull, warping the purple alloy under his fingers with the strength of his grip, and kept his other arm wrapped around Connie’s middle, holding her tightly as he hung on for their lives.

“You just lacked the stone for it."

The very last of Connie’s winds gave a final push against the ocean, shoving it backwards in every direction as she fell limp in Steven’s embrace.

Murky blue walls gave way to a clear sky as the Sloop leapt into the air out of the mouth of the collapsing whirlpool. Connie felt her stomach flip weightlessly as their boat hovered in the sky, then plummeted. The hull struck water and slammed hard into them from below, rattling Connie’s teeth. They bobbed in the calming waters, rocking back and forth as the waves smoothed over the last of the unnatural Gem forces as nature resumed its balance.

Slowly, the other Gems looked to one another, silently counting to see if anyone had been lost. But everyone had weathered the tempest. Even Peridot’s garbage can drone had survived with nothing more than a beading skin of mist clinging to its chassis. 

“You did it,” Steven said, his voice choked with astonishment. His bracing grip on her became a ferocious hug, crushing her to his chest. “You did it!” he cheered.

As Steven released her, Connie slumped to the floor of the Sloop. Every inch of her body throbbed with exhaustion. She couldn’t even lift her head to return his smile with one of her own. “Hooray…” she croaked.

“Yeah, she did!” Amethyst cried, rocking the boat as she leapt in excitement. “Way to go, Tornado Girl! Ain’t no ocean stopping you!”

“Simply incredible!” Pearl agreed, as Garnet nodded.

The gushing praise washed over Connie. She was too tired to feel her usual abashedness. “Thanks,” she wheezed. “Anybody have any water? Maybe a Protes bar?”

“Uh, we’re surrounded by water?” Peridot said, confused. “Hang on, I’ll dunk your head for you.”

But Pearl waved off Peridot’s hands, and then reached to her glowing gemstone. A crisp bottle of water appeared from her inner storehouse, which she handed to Steven. Then she reached for her stone again, this time retrieving a sextant, its brass fittings polished like a mirror. Peering through the lens in the direction of the sun, Pearl hummed thoughtfully. “We’re about two hours from the nearest warp pad, assuming we can catch a good wind,” she reported.

As Steven tipped the bottle gently to her lips, Connie took a long, sweet sip, and savored the cold water trickling through her. “Gimme a second,” she grunted into the mouth of the bottle.

With tremendous effort, Connie called the winds. A gentle breeze filled the Sloop’s sail, tugging the boat into motion. Garnet’s hand was already on the tiller, steering them at Pearl’s direction.

Steven glanced down at Connie, careful to keep his shadow over her face to protect her from the sun, putting a shaggy halo around his smile. “Now you’re just showing off,” he teased her.

For the first time in what felt like forever, Connie grinned. “All in a day’s work for a Jade,” she said.

Chapter Text

Connie gazed out at the empty ocean, leaning back on the veritable wall of books she had fished out of the surf. Even in this dream space, she felt tired. But a sense of accomplishment bubbled up through that exhaustion, buoying her.

She had finally found all of Jade’s books.

For nearly a month, she had worked in her dreams to collect the mysterious volumes left bobbing in the liminal ocean where Jade had sacrificed herself to save Connie from the spread of her corruption. Seemingly endless at first, she had noticed their numbers dwindling as the weeks went by. Each trip took longer and longer to fill her arms as she skated across the black water with Jade’s wind powers—her wind powers, now—to pluck them up like bottled messages on the waves.

Tilting her head back, Connie could just see the upper edge of her collection looming behind her. It spanned the entire length of the beach in big bunches of books gathered atop green sailcloth squares that Connie summoned from her gemstone to keep them off the sand. There must have been thousands of volumes. Too many to count easily, even if she hadn’t felt too tired to try.

She still couldn’t read any of them. Every cover she opened revealed page after page of nonsense. Occasionally, she could pull a random word in English out of them, like explore, or history, or peanut butter. But never in any order, or even in proximity enough to be associated with each other. The Gem glyphs she recognized in them were likewise unintelligible. Evidently Peridot’s translation algorithm hadn’t been designed to handle gibberish.

Still, she had them all at last. Whatever they were, whatever they meant, Jade had wanted Connie to have them, or they wouldn’t exist. Even if she could never read them, just knowing that Jade had left them for her was enough.

The books behind her shifted a little, cradling her weight as she leaned against them and stared out at the empty horizon. At the edge of the dream world, where the ocean met the night sky, there was a long, thin band of perfect blackness that cut the world in half. Staring at it made her feel cold. 

“You were so full of yourself,” Connie heard herself murmuring. “You thought you knew everything, especially when you didn’t. You were mean, and pushy, and you would have blown the world away before compromising on anything.

“And you were brilliant. And fierce.” The cold inside of her warmed a little. “Tougher than anyone I’ve ever met. Even without a body, you were always ready to fight with everything you had for what you believed in.”

The tide pushed gently against the sand, the only response she received.

“I hope I can be as good a Jade as you were,” Connie sighed. “I’m sure gonna try.”

And she said nothing more, content to lean against her stacks and stare at the ocean until morning came to wake her.

Connie stirred, lifting her head from her nest of blankets atop the cot. She blinked at the early morning peering in through the windows of the beach house, the sun still climbing up over the tide to spill warm colors across the coastline. The call of hungry seagulls on the hunt for breakfast cackled over the low thrum of the waves against the sand and the whisper of the breeze coming inland.

Her gaze rose to the loft above her. Steven’s bedding sat rumpled and empty, surprising Connie with his absence. 

All throughout their long trip back from the Celerity Forge, the Gems had spoken of what to do next. And despite the overwhelming urge to find and end Shard’s invasion, they finally came to the conclusion that Shard’s cargo ship simply had them outclassed in mobility. She could be anywhere on or off the planet in a matter of minutes, which meant that, unless they could locate the Opulence, they could only stay vigilant for Shard’s next move.

To stay vigilant, the rest of the Gems went on patrol, but only after deciding that certain Gems among them who needed sleep and food would go home first. Any protest Steven and Connie had raised at the decision ended in yawns and rumbling stomachs. 

Without words, Connie and Steven had agreed to put off any other conversations for later. They’d returned late to a dark beach house and raided the fridge for leftovers, eating in silence, occasionally smiling at each other, and then had both collapsed into their respective beds to fall immediately asleep. 

She had so much left to say to Steven before her mother came the next day to take her home. So much to talk about after they had fused, and had said—or maybe not said—certain things to each other. Connie didn’t want to leave them unsaid.

But where she thought she’d feel anxious, she instead felt…nothing. This wasn’t the aching wound her half-hollow had been. She didn’t feel bad, or good, or happy, or sad. She didn’t feel, period. Which would have unnerved her, if she could feel unnerved at all.

Then her stomach gurgled, and she realized that she could still feel hunger, at least. She rose and got dressed, changing in the bathroom despite being alone in the house. For all the weeks she’d lived there, she still felt like a stranger in Steven’s home. Lucky for me, she thought moodily as she traded her pajamas for shorts and a tank top, I’ll only be here another day.

Glancing in the mirror, she huffed at the reflection of her mangled hair. An inkling of regret tickled the void inside of her as she thought of the long, thick hair she’d had for as far back as she could remember. One edge of her hair now dangled just below her shoulder, tapering down across her back until it reached the other side, which brushed against her elbow, sliced diagonally by Pyrite’s axe.

But the inkling faded quickly. Sacrificing a little vanity in order to halve Shard’s strongest warrior felt like a more than fair trade. She dug a scrunchie out of her bathroom bag and wadded her uneven hair into a ponytail that hung crookedly down her back. Good enough, she decided, and her reflection nodded in agreement.

An unfeeling morning called for an unflavored breakfast, and so Connie poured herself a heaping bowl of It’s Bran from the cupboard. She was just finishing the milk dregs from the bowl and booking bran facts from the back of the cereal box when the temple door split down the middle and slid apart. Steven and the other Gems emerged from inside, backlit by the warmth of the Burning room.

“—take us a few hours,” Pearl murmured to Steven. “And we’ll need your help to… Oh! Good morning, Connie!” The graceful Gem startled at the sight of Connie seated at the island counter, and she jerked upright from her conspiratorial whispering with Steven.

Steven floundered for a moment as his expression flipped from surprised to guilty and then to solemn. “Good morning, Connie,” he said, his voice oddly formal. “I hope you slept well.”

“Yeah…” Connie slid herself off her stool and faced Steven. She couldn’t blame him for being a little awkward after everything that had transpired between them. She would have felt awkward herself if not for the shapeless blank void where her feelings normally were. And as long as she couldn’t feel awkward, she decided to use it to say some long overdue things. “I’m glad you’re all here, actually. I wanted to talk to you all.”

“Me too,” Steven said. A hint of worry slipped through his overly formal facade as he hurried to add, “But maybe I should go first—”

“Please,” Connie said gently, interrupting him. “I promise, it’s nothing bad. I know I’ve been…well, my dad would probably say ‘melodramatic,’ but the truth is, I’ve been a jerk lately. Maybe even since I got here. And I’m sorry for that.”

Garnet folded her arms, her expression stoic and implaccable as ever behind her mirrored visor. “It’s alright,” she said.

“Yeah, you became half-Gem practically overnight,” Amethyst added. “It took Steven fourteen years to get a handle on that biz. You basically speed-ran a ‘Steven’ in a few weeks. It’s actually pretty impressive.”

Connie smiled faintly at the praise. “Thanks,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it without all of you. And I wanted to thank you for your help, and for letting me stay here. Y’know, since I’m, um, going home tomorrow.” The words felt forced without any feelings to put behind them, but she knew they all deserved at least that much from her, and so much more.

“You are always welcome here,” Pearl said warmly. “And we’re so proud of the progress you’ve made.”

Steven cleared his throat loudly.

Jolting, Pearl hurried to add, “Buh—But, er, before you can leave, you’ll need to complete our, um, evaluation!”

“Evaluation?” Connie repeated.

“Yes,” Steven said, affecting his most serious tone to match his stony features. “You see, Camp Crystal Gem has a reputation to uphold. Our campers go on to do great things, like save the world, or get second place in the annual Beach City Summer Daze Festival egg tossing contest. And to ensure that each camper meets our highest standards, they have to complete a final test before they can graduate.”

“Yeah! You wanna leave? You gotta earn that ticket home, little mama!” Amethyst crowed.

“A test,” Connie said, chewing on the word. Her eye drifted from the nervously smiling Pearl, to Steven’s obvious struggle to remain stoic, to Amethyst’s broad grin, and finally to the unreadable Garnet. 

“Yup,” said Steven. “Each of the Crystal Gems is going to test you for things you’ve learned while you’ve been here. And it’ll be super-hard tests too, so don’t expect us to go easy on you because we’re friends.”

“The honor of Camp Crystal Gem is at stake,” Garnet deadpanned.

Connie stared at Steven and his cracking facade, fully aware that he had cooked up some kind of silly plan and had somehow roped the other Gems into playing along. This graduation exam was as phony as the summer camp it purported to conclude. 

But after all of the grief she had caused him, and all of the horrible things she had said, Connie wanted to make it up to Steven more than anything. If that meant playing along with his silly plan, then she would be glad to do it.

And besides, it would be so nice to feel silly again, even for just a day.

“Okay,” Connie said, nodding seriously. “I’ll try my best. Though I should probably warn you that nobody’s taught me egg tossing yet.”

“Huh? Oh!” Steven turned pink at the joke. “Don’t worry, we won’t test you on anything like that. Just super-serious, important stuff that every Crystal Gem needs to know.”

“Right. So,” Connie said, pushing enthusiasm into her tone as she rubbed her hands together, “what do I have to do?”

“Oh! Um…” Steven looked to the other Crystal Gems, startled by the question. Connie realized with a little spark of mirth that neither he nor any of the other Gems had actually planned this scheme of theirs beyond the sales pitch to her. Which, Connie couldn’t help but note, was exactly what she should have expected.

A sudden and terrific CRASH resounded from outside the house, rescuing Steven from his own lack of planning. Connie whirled at the noise, already drawing a sword from her gemstone and running for the screen door. The others followed in hot pursuit, summoning weapons. Together, they all piled through the door, erupting onto the deck to strike a fearsome pose with weapons readied and eyes searching for the source of the noise.

“Nikki!” Peridot’s howl drew their eyes up to the lofted hand of the temple’s stone guardian. The little engineer leaned over the edge of the enormous palm, shouting down at the beach below. “I told you to catch all of that!”

Down the hill, a pile of scrap metal sat scattered directly below the hand. Pieces of steel and iron in all shapes and sizes had landed in a rough circle, gnarled and tangled together from the apparent fall. As Connie watched, the side of the pile shifted, then collapsed, and Peridot’s one surviving trash can droid rolled out of the pile on its caterpillar treads. “Keep your eye on the ball, campers!” Nikki announced in its facsimile of Peridot’s voice.

Their weapons vanished into motes when the lack of danger became apparent. Sighing impatiently, Pearl shouted up at the hand-platform, “Peridot! I hope you’re not planning to leave this mess all over our beach!”

“Well, where am I supposed to put it?” Peridot shouted back, wagging her fists in a rage. “You already told me I can’t keep it in the house! I’m even using the outside warp pad like you insisted so I wouldn’t track motor oil all over your precious floor!”

Steven brightened at some unspoken realization. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he called up, “Peridot, would you come down here for a moment?”

“Ugh, fine!” Peridot vanished for a moment, and then returned with a square of sheet metal as big as a car’s hood. She heaved the sheet over the edge, and then hopped after it. The sheet metal’s plummet abruptly slowed, grasped in Peridot’s ferrokinesis, and carried her slowly and safely to the railing of the beach house’s deck. “What is it? I still have a lot of work to do,” she groused.

With a lack of danger in the moment, Connie had time to appreciate Peridot’s Crystal Gem makeover.  The stars in lieu of diamonds, and her bold new eyewear, made their resident tinkerer seem much more at home than she ever had in her Yellow Diamond uniform. But Peridot had made one addition to her new look since the day before: a makeshift harness of borrowed straps and bungee cords that looped over her shoulders and around her waist, all in support of a small padded basket hanging from her chest. And nested in the basket atop a bed of clean towels was Lapis’s blue teardrop stone.

A tiny pang of worry echoed in Connie’s void as she thought about Lapis rebuilding herself inside of the stone. Or maybe she envied Lapis, or any other Gem, who could take their time to build themselves anew as they saw fit. In either case, she hoped she got to see Lapis before leaving the next morning. Not that they would never see each other again, but Connie didn’t like the idea of Lapis emerging from her gemstone to find Connie gone without saying goodbye.

Pearl puffed up, ready to shout back at Peridot, when Steven quickly stepped between them. “Peridot, I’m glad you’re back! You’re gonna be going back to get more stuff from the farm, right?”

“At this rate, it’ll take me all day,” Peridot groaned, and waved back at her pile of scrap on the beach. “Nikki’s enthusiastic, but she lacks the dexterity to be of much help in the salvage operation.”

“Perfect!” Steven exclaimed. As Peridot gave him a confused look, he quickly pivoted. “Uh, I mean, that sounds like your first Crystal Gem test, Connie! You can go help Peridot get everything she needs from the farm.”

Connie shrugged. It didn’t seem like much of a test, since she would have helped Peridot regardless. But Steven seemed enthusiastic about the idea, and since her own emotions had taken a holiday, she decided to trust his instead. “Sure, I can do that,” she agreed.

Peridot looked back and forth between them, perplexed. “I have no idea what either of you are talking about, but I’m happy to have some help. Hop on, Connie Jade!” she said, and stepped to one side to make room for Connie on the levitating sheet metal.

Connie could have easily Gem-jumped to the temple guardian’s hand, but didn’t want to refuse Peridot’s kind gesture. Plus, riding an elevator without any walls or shaft was a rare opportunity. As Peridot lifted them off the sand, she was treated to a glorious view of the morning shore. 

“Have fun, you two!” Steven called, waving them goodbye as they ascended through a thoroughly confused flock of seagulls that swerved to avoid their rising platform.

As the sheet metal reached the giant’s palm, Connie and Peridot stepped off and clambered onto the warp pad set next to the temple’s laundry machines. Peridot let the broad corrugated sheet slip from her ferrokinetic grasp, and it tumbled into the sand far below. “Do you have any idea what they’re doing?” Peridot said.

“I was hoping maybe you knew,” Connie admitted.

“How would I? They never tell me anything,” Peridot grumbled.

A warp tunnel whisked them to the farm, depositing them into the tatters of the barnyard with a rush of humid, sweetly-scented air. Silence loomed across the farm. Even the birds had fled, taking with them the songs that used to color the background of Peridot’s and Lapis’s home. And in that stark silence, what remained of the farm now seemed like an open wound festering in the ground.

Connie stepped daintily across the tattered yard where Polarite had ripped the extensive gloop minefield out from underground in the heat of battle. Beside it, the corpse of the barn spread, a heap of flinders and scrap metal. Its armor had been its own undoing, crushed underneath the ferrokinetic grip of Shard’s scientist. Now there were hardly any pieces recognizable as the cozy home Peridot and Lapis had shared. 

“At least the Roaming Eye didn’t get trashed too,” Connie noted, forcing optimism into her tone as she pointed out the Crystal Gems’ secondhand spaceship. 

“Lucky me, since I’ll probably be living out of it,” Peridot said crossly. As she gestured at the collapsed barn, several of its scrap armor plates shifted free of the pile and rose, then tumbled to one side as Peridot’s metal powers tossed them out of the way. “Though I guess I could always move back into the bathroom at the house, if Steven will let me.”

Connie stood clear as Peridot tossed aside more of the metal siding. “Maybe you could room with Steven? There’s no toilet there. Plus, after I leave, there will be a little more room to spare.”

Peridot balked at the suggestion, letting the wreckage settle as she turned her full attention to Connie. “Then you really are leaving?” she asked, her voice rising with concern.

Shrugging, Connie looked down at her shoes and said, “I mean, I said I would, so…”

“Well, you shouldn’t!” Peridot declared. “I like it when you’re around, and I know Lapis feels the same way. We would miss you too much if you returned to your previous living situation. Besides, if I did everything I said I would, Amethyst would already have that burrito machine she keeps bothering me about. False promises are, by observation alone, an essential component of social interaction on Earth.”

Connie smirked. “Maybe. But my mom is coming anyway, and she isn’t big on false promises.”

Peridot grunted noncommittally, and returned to her work of sifting the metal out of the wooden remains of the barn. Connie supposed that the little engineer didn’t have much experience with how parents and children interacted beyond what she’d seen between Steven and his father, which would in no way whatsoever prepare her for Priyanka Maheswaran.

“Still, that’s really nice of you to say. Thanks. I like being around you and Lapis too,” Connie added.

And she was a little surprised to find that she meant what she’d said. She hadn’t always appreciated Peridot’s mad science approach to exploring the physical and mental connection between Connie and Jade. But nobody had worked harder, besides Steven, to help Connie through the difficult changes she’d faced when Jade had come into her life, and when Jade had left it.

“I guess I should be used to it by now. Everything changes all the time on Earth, right?” Peridot said tightly. Tears threatened the corners of her eyes as her hands moved on their own, sweeping aside bigger and bigger pieces of scrap to clonk worthlessly onto the broken ground around them. “My workshop is gone, Lapis still hasn’t re-formed yet, Pumpkin lost her favorite napping nook under my workbench, you’re leaving, nobody wants me and my stuff cluttering up their space, not to mention that sand is a terrible environment for any kind of delicate technical work—”

The little engineer jolted as Connie wrapped her in a sideways hug and pressed her forehead deep into Peridot’s bushy triangle of hair.

Stiffening, Peridot let the last of her scrap tumble aside and looked up at Connie. “What’s this for?” Peridot said, confused.

“Somebody really smart told me that, when you don’t know how else to help someone, you should hug them,” Connie said sagely.

Peridot’s eyes wobbled behind her yellow shades. She dove into Connie’s embrace, clutching Connie tightly around the waist. “It was a good barn,” she said into Connie’s chest, her voice quavering.

“It was,” Connie agreed. “But the stuff that made it good isn’t going away. It just might not be in the same spot anymore.”

Sniffling, Peridot nestled inside Connie’s arms for a few moments more. Then she stepped free and pretended to scratch at her cheeks to wipe her eyes dry, and turned back to the wreckage. “That’s a majority of the accessible ferrous material. I can probably kitbash a rudimentary metal lever to begin excavating the wooden portions…”

“Let me try it first,” Connie said. She stepped up to a humongous portion of the collapsed roof and dug her fingers underneath the edge. If anything, she thought she might be able to shift parts of it out of the way to make things easier for Peridot and her lever. But to Connie’s surprise, she heaved the section up onto one end, where it teetered precariously, then fell down in the opposite direction. Connie didn’t even realize how heavy the section was until it landed, kicking up a cloud of dust with a thunderous ker-THRUMP!

“Wow!” Peridot cheered. “It seems your Gem strength has fully asserted itself in your new combined form, Connie Jade!”

Connie stared down at her hands, then back to the enormous debris she’d flipped like a pancake. Maybe I should practice egg tossing after all, just for control, she thought. I’m a lot stronger than I thought I’d be.

“Let’s try that again a little more carefully,” Connie drawled. 

Between Connie’s wall-flipping strength and Peridot’s perfect memory of the various chaotic half-finished doodads in her workshop, they finished their salvaging in only a few hours. As the dust settled back onto the barn’s remains, Connie brushed her hands clean and regarded the pile of junk before them with a sense of pride. “Is that really all of it?”

Peridot stood precariously atop her mound of inventions, most of them held together with zip ties and insufficient welding. “Everything worth saving,” she grunted. “Anything left can be sourced again from human refuse, and isn’t worth the effort.” 

A ghost of a smile tugged at Connie’s mouth. “So, do I pass the test?”

“Eh? Oh, yes, Steven’s nonsense. Of course you pass. Congratulations,” Peridot said distractedly.

“Just like that, huh? No deliberation?” Connie teased.

Peridot tore her attentions away from her salvage with a confused expression. “You’re a Gem, and you want to protect Earth. What else is there to being a Crystal Gem?”

A tiny jot of warmth blossomed in Connie’s chest, and her smirk evaporated. Since the beginning, Connie had always thought of the Crystal Gems as a grand legacy, a secret history of the world hidden in plain sight, a shield lifted to the stars against cosmic and unknowable threats. But Peridot’s words pulled that notion from Connie like a veil being lifted.

“Huh. Yeah, I guess so,” she said uncertainly. Then, shaking away head clear, she asked, “Do you want some help getting this to the warp pad?”

Peridot snapped her gaze back from where she’d been caught staring back across the barn’s ruins, to the little clearing with the old tree in the back. “Huh? Oh, no, that won’t be necessary. You can head back. I have a few things left to collect that won’t require assistance.” Smiling, she added, “And wow, thanks for helping me.”

That little mote of warmth grew inside of Connie, and she answered with the first real smile she’d felt all day. “You’re welcome,” she said.

It took Connie four tries to warp back to the beach house, though through no power incontinence on her part. When she’d tried to return to the pad in front of the temple door, the warp tunnel refused to open. It was only when she tried the laundry pad atop the guardian statue’s hand that the pad cooperated, and whisked her back to the temple, where Garnet was waiting for her.

“Waugh!” Connie yelped as the warp tunnel fell away to reveal Garnet seated cross-legged atop the dryer, hands braced against her knees, her mirrored visor staring right through where Connie stood on the pad. “Garnet! You jump-scared me,” Connie said, clutching a hand to her chest.

“Sorry,” Garnet deadpanned. 

As her heartbeat ramped down from its hummingbird pace, Connie’s startlement faded into nervous curiosity. “Are, um, you my next test?”

“No,” Garnet said. “I’m going last. Come find me after the others.” And with that, she went silent, continuing to stare through Connie.

“Oh…kay…” Connie drawled, and backed off of the warp pad. Garnet’s gaze didn’t follow her, glued to the horizon as Connie stepped off the guardian’s hand and floated down to the porch below.

As she settled onto creaking boards worn smooth by seaspray, she was confronted by a sight she’d never seen before. An old blanket covered the inside windows of the screen door, hooked over the top of the door, blocking any view from the outside. The blinds on the windows had been drawn as well, leaving the inside of the house a mystery. And when she pulled on the handle of the screen door, she found it locked. She hadn’t even realized the screen door could lock at all.

Knocking on the glass, she called, “Hello?”

The blanket crooked around thick fingers, and Greg Universe peered through the window corner. His grin split his goatee as he said, “Oh, you’re back early! Steven thought you and Peridot would be at it all day. Sorry, but the beach house is closed for…renovations.”

“Renovations?” she echoed, confused.

“Yeah, Steven wanted to spruce the place up, so I’m helping him,” Greg explained. A soft voice spoke something too soft from within the house for Connie to hear. Cocking his head back toward the voice, Greg nodded, and then told Connie, “Apparently, Amethyst is up next in whatever it is you’re all doing. She’ll be out in a minute.”

Her confusion grew as she tried and failed to peer through the tiny sliver of visible house through the window. She’d been grounded several times in the past, forced to stay inside as punishment, but being forced to stay outside was a new sensation. “Can’t I wait for her inside? I won’t get in the way. Maybe I could even help.”

“Oh, no. I’ve been given clear instructions,” Greg insisted, shaking his head. “You can’t come in until we’re done. Boss’s orders.”

“Okay, but…” Connie shifted from foot to foot, suddenly faced with a new problem now that she had been exiled from the house. “I kinda have to go to the bathroom.”

“Oh. Oh!” Greg’s brow furrowed, and then he dug into his pocket. A ring of keys jangled as he lifted them to the window with a sheepish expression. “Uh, can you make it to the carwash?”

Chapter Text

Connie stared glumly at the empty paper towel dispenser in the bathroom, dried her hands on her shorts, and then worked the door handle with her elbow, pushing her way back onto the blacktop of the car wash. Amethyst loomed just outside the door, waiting for Connie with an expectant grin.

“DONE WITH YOUR GROSS HUMAN BIZ?” Amethyst bellowed, her arms and legs flying outward in an explosion of excitement.

Connie yelped, stumbling backwards until she caught herself against the bathroom sink. “Amethyst!” she snapped.

“Then it’s test time, girl!” Amethyst declared, ignoring Connie’s annoyance.

Forcing her heartbeat to slow with long, deep breaths, Connie groused, “Did you guys all plan to spook me today? Is Pearl going to jump out from behind a corner or something?”

“Ha! You wish Pearl was this much fun! Naw, it’s just me right now,” Amethyst told her. “I’m in charge, and I got the toughest test you’re gonna see all day.”

Becalmed and with semi-dry hands, Connie nodded and plastered a smile on her face. They’ve already had too much of Crummy Connie to deal with. It’s your last day here, and you’d still like to visit later, so leave them with a good impression, she coached herself. 

“Okay,” she said aloud. “I’m ready for anything, Professor Amethyst.”

“Ooh, a callback! That’s bonus points on your test,” Amethyst chortled. “And you’re gonna need ‘em, too, because this is gonna be a straight-up quest. I’m talking traps, pitfalls, monsters, the works!

Embers of anticipation kindled in Connie’s emptiness. She felt herself leaning forward as she said, “Really? What is it?”

“You,” Amethyst declared, puffing with grand importance, “are getting lunch!”

She settled back onto her heels. “...for the monsters? Behind the traps and pitfalls?” Connie asked, perplexed.

“No, dummy, for us!” Amethyst laughed. The stocky Gem pulled a wrinkly slip of paper from her shirt and thrust it into Connie’s hands. “I already put in the orders, so it’s all set. Go get that stuff, and bring it back to the porch. But if you drop anything, or give up, it’s over. Simple enough?”

Connie stared dumbfounded at the list written in clumsy, blocky lettering. Though the order was large, it only required three stops: the Big Donut, Fish Stew Pizza, and Beach Citywalk Fries. Such a trivial thing barely warranted the word errand, much less test.

But, if Amethyst wanted lunch, Connie could oblige. “Okay,” she said, feigning far more enthusiasm than she felt. “I won’t let you down.”

“Attagirl!” Amethyst cheered, and cocked her fist. 

Still staring at the list, Connie started across the car wash’s lot, planning her route. The Big Donut was closest, with its enormous namesake looming at the far end of the street, so she would start there.

A loud PHWUMP from behind her startled Connie, and she whirled around in time to catch a wave of crisscrossing wires across her face. The mesh struck with enough force to throw her off her feet, and she tumbled to the pavement, landing hard on her tailbone. As she tried to pull herself up, she found her limbs caught in a tangle of the mesh, and realized she had been snared in a net.

A small, pale boy in a sailor’s suit emerged from around the corner of the car wash. It took Connie an extra second in her addled state to recognize him as Onion. He shouldered a long rifle-like net gun, its payload spent, as he met her slack-jawed stare with a look of supreme satisfaction. 

Amethyst slung an arm around him as they watched Connie struggle to free herself from her nylon bonds. “Oh, I forgot to mention, I have a sidekick helping with the test. What do teachers call their sidekicks? Teachettes? Teachlings? Smart-smiths?”

“Teaching assistants,” Connie answered reflexively as she searched furiously for the edge of the net. “But they don’t usually have A NET GUN!”

“He’ll be in charge of making sure you don’t have it too easy out there,” Amethyst continued, heedless of Connie’s indignation.

“With a NET GUN?” Connie insisted.

“Right? He started with the net gun. Crazy! And I’m not even paying him!” Amethyst rubbed her chin with a sudden, sobering thought. “Come to think of it, I’m not getting paid either. Man, educators are so underappreciated. It’s a real shame.”

“Amethyst!” Connie howled.

But Amethyst ran off giggling, with Onion trailing behind her in silence. The little boy cast one final, ominous look at Connie before he and the stocky Gem disappeared behind the row of houses across the street.

After several frustrating moments, Connie unknotted herself from the net and threw it aside. Then she turned her gaze out upon the distant boardwalk and its scatterings of summer tourists who cloaked the hidden dangers ahead of her. Her confusion galvanized into a readied determination.

“Fine,” Connie said, and cracked her knuckles. “You want to get lunch? C'mon, let’s get lunch!”

With her warrior’s senses honed to a fine edge, Connie skulked up to the Big Donut. She had been on high alert for any sign of her would-be teachers, using houses for cover and sticking to the shadows. Her skulduggery made the simple walk to the corner shop a lengthy and nerve-wracking slog, but she vowed not to be caught off-guard again.

As she approached the glass doors of the shop, she peered inside for any hint of danger. Nothing seemed odd, save for the looks of confusion that Lars and Sadie gave her from behind the counter. 

Then she spotted it: hidden beneath the awning of the roof, a dark green plastic bucket hung suspended by its handle with a nigh-invisible tether of fishing line. That same line wound back down to the door, and would probably be loosed as soon as Connie gave the door the slightest tug. Beads of water clung to the sides of the bucket, telltale leftovers of when it had been hastily filled.

Connie grinned triumphantly up at the booby trap. Decisively, she grabbed the door by its handle and yanked it open, using its glass to shield herself as the bucket toppled. The cold water in the bucket splashed across the pavement and onto the tile inside, but none of it could touch Connie behind the door.

“Hey, come on!” Lars groused from inside. “Now Sadie’s gonna have to mop that up!”

Ignoring him, Connie swept her gaze out across the lot, trying to see where Amethyst might be hiding. “That prank is older than my dad!” she called out. “Is that all you—”

A second gout of water plunged down on Connie, soaking her from head to toe. Sputtering, Connie looked up and wiped her eyes to find Amethyst grinning down at her from the edge of the roof. Onion crouched next to the Gem with a freshly-emptied bucket tipped in his hands.

“Nobody ever expects a second bucket,” Amethyst said sagely. 

“Ugh! Seriously?” Connie shot back, and wrung uselessly at her shirt.

“Yeah, this does feel like a step down from the net,” Amethyst agreed in a disappointed tone. “That’s the danger of going too big too fast. You gotta leave room to escalate things, y’know?”

Onion didn’t seem to hear Amethyst’s criticisms. He just stared at Connie, his dark eyes unblinking, his face pallid, expressionless.

Sighing, Connie trudged into the Big Donut, unable to step around the puddle gathering at the base of the door, and dripping water the entire way to the counter. 

Lars’s grouchy expression melted into terror as he recognized Connie. “Gah! Don’t blast me into the wall again!” he whined, and ducked down behind the counter.

Sadie collected a pair of boxes and pushed them across the counter. “Here you go. Two dozen, mixed assortment. Amethyst already paid.”

Yet she still has so much more to pay, Connie vowed silently as she accepted the cardboard boxes. As her feet shifted, she heard the wet plop of her sneakers in a growing puddle around her, and gave Sadie an apologetic look. “Sorry about the mess.”

Already with mop in hand, Sadie stepped around Lars, pointedly jostling him off of his phone as she stepped around the counter. “When you live in Beach City long enough, you get used to Gem stuff,” she said, and shrugged.

“Used to the total constant nightmare of weirdness, you mean,” Lars grumbled, and returned to scrolling on his phone.

As Connie left, careful to walk in her own wet footprints to minimize Sadie’s mopping, she felt a wistful tug at the thought of Lars’s so-called weirdness. Life in Beach City never sat still, with each day being different from the last. Compared to the structured, perhaps even overly-structured, life waiting for her back home, chaos had been a welcome respite from her everyday drudgery. 

Her wistfulness evaporated the instant she stepped outside, when a deluge of something grainy and brown pounded over her. Connie staggered, coughing, overwhelmed by the taste and smell of stale bread. She looked down at herself and saw a coating of little break chunks sticking to her wet skin and clothes.

Tilting back, her vision mottled with breadcrumbs stuck in her eyelashes, she glared at Onion, who held another empty bucket upside-down with a few crumbs still flitting out of it. Amethyst stood behind him, grinning. “I spoke too soon. He had a part two planned!” the Gem howled with laughter.

Connie huffed, kicking a spray of crumbs from her crusty lips. “What, is he gonna deep-fry me next? Is there a bucket of boiling oil up there too?”

Amethyst looked down at Onion questioningly. The little boy shook his head in reply. “Naw, I don’t think so,” Amethyst called down.

Connie’s snarky retort died in her throat as she heard an ominous keening from overhead. Looking up, she saw a cloud of seagulls already in flight, circling above her. Shadows whorled around her like the teeth of a hungry, swirling maw. A few of the braver ones landed just a few feet away and began to scoop greedily at the edges of the crumby bread crunching under Connie’s feet. Then a few more, and many more after that, until Connie found herself surrounded by a growing circle of birds and a shrinking halo of breadcrumbs.

In just a few seconds, the easy pickings were gone, and the hungry birds looked elsewhere for more food. Their attention instantly turned to Connie, covered in their most recent meal, and carrying stacked boxes of even more food, with a heap of breadcrumbs still piled on the topmost box from when Onion had doused Connie.

Connie stared back at the flock of seagulls eyeing her hungrily. “Easy, now,” she cooed, and tried to step gingerly between birds.

The movement triggered an explosion of flapping wings that swallowed Connie. Dozens of gulls, all furious at the thought of their next meal running away, swarmed around her in a raging cloud. She ran, screaming, trying to shield the donut boxes as best she could, ducking her head to protect her face from errant talons and snapping beaks.

Amethyst’s laughter rose above the squawking cacophony. “Those guys better not taste any donuts before I do, or you’re fired! Or failed, or whatever it is teachers do!” she called after Connie.

Her footsteps pounded on the salt-scoured planks of the boardwalk as Connie fled the roiling cloud of feathers and beaks all around her. She could barely see small glimpses of her surroundings through gaps in the gull-cloud, and watched her feet to guide herself, hoping that she didn’t careen into anyone or anything by accident. Small throngs of tourists yelped in alarm and leapt out of her way, diving into the sand or crashing through the nearby T-shirt shop, sending racks of novelty shirts tumbling behind them. 

Connie could feel the nip and pull of the bravest seagulls snatching at the crumbs in her lopsided ponytail, while still more swooped in front of her, leaving deep grooves in the top of the donut box as they tore away what few breadcrumbs remained atop it. But even when the last crumbs were cleaned from the boxtop, the gulls continued to attack. She realized with a sinking heart that Beach City’s gulls could recognize what those iconic pink doughnut boxes meant, and what treasures lay inside. Why scour a garbage can for scraps when the only thing standing between them and two dozen warm, delicious doughnuts was a single frightened girl?

The flashing sight of Fish Stew Pizza appeared to her in glimpses between gulls, and Connie made a beeline for the restaurant’s front door. Immediately, though, her thoughts of taking refuge soured. She knew she could never hope to open and close the door without letting at least some of the gull-cloud through with her. Most restaurants frowned on having a bunch of screaming, parasite-infested wildlife come raging through their front door. Kofi would ban her for life, or make her work two lifetimes as his permanent dishwasher just to make up for it.

But Connie was no forever dishwasher, and she certainly wasn’t a frightened girl. She was a warrior, and a Gem, and she had suffered nature’s wrath long enough.

A thousand little currents surrounded Connie in the beating of the gulls’ wings. Little crisscrossing gusts of air formed a bubble of chaos around her. Reaching through her Gem, Connie grasped at all of those little currents and steered them into a single, cohesive whole, making them rotate clockwise around her. Then, as the seagulls began to follow the path of this new breeze they had created, Connie magnified the gusts until they became a column of whirling air.

Greedy cawing became panicky squawking as the gulls tumbled in Connie’s winds. She didn’t want to hurt any of them, but she did want to leave them with an impression. So she lifted her gull-nado overhead, keeping the column of whirling feathers intact until it rose above the nearby rooftop of Fish Stew Pizza. Then she released the tornado with one final burst of speed, sending a spray of gulls flapping in all directions. The liberated birds sped away from the inexplicable betrayal of the wind as fast as their wings could carry them, creating a starburst of gray and white that fled in terror.

The out-of-towners gawked at her, but she had no time to explain complicated things like Gem powers or her mission to the uninitiated. Connie brushed uselessly at the crumbs pasted to her soaking wet clothes, then gave up and entered the restaurant. She saw Jenny behind the counter, and Kiki working the ovens in the back. “Um, hi,” Connie said awkwardly, pasting an uncertain smile on her crumby face. 

Jenny looked up from her phone and startled. “Girl, are you okay? You look like tempura!” the teen exclaimed.

Connie looked down at herself and sighed. “It’s too much to explain,” she said.

“Gem stuff. Got it,” Jenny said, nodding. Then she brightened, thumping her forehead with her palm, and added, “Oh, you must be here for those pizzas Amethyst ordered! I thought something was weird, since she doesn’t usually pay for anything.”

“Coming out of the oven now!” Kiki called from in front of the open oven. Wielding a huge wooden peel, she swept two pizzas out and slid them into matching cardboard boxes.

“Oh, yeah,” Jenny said, brightening. “I almost forgot: are you gonna be around next weekend? A bunch of us were thinking of having a bonfire down on the beach.”

“...oh!” Connie took an extra moment to realize Jenny’s words were an invitation. She’d only attended one other party, which the Gems had thrown for Steven at the farm for his birthday. “Umm…”

Kiki sidled next to her twin and slid the warm pizza boxes across the counter. “You should come! It’d be nice to hang out without pizza involved. …making pizza, I mean. We’re definitely bringing a few to share.”

“Yeah!” Jenny agreed. “And bring Steven with you!”

Connie nodded mechanically as she gathered the pizza boxes into her arms, stacking them underneath the doughnuts to create a shelf. “Yeah, of course,” she heard herself saying, instead of the very reasonable explanation that she couldn’t attend, because she was leaving Beach City, because she had suffered a mental breakdown and worn out her welcome with Steven and the Gems, and had learned to control the part of Jade that was now a part of her, so she wasn’t in as much danger of blowing down her parents' house anymore.

“Cool!” Jenny said, beaming. Then her smile dwindled, and a look of confusion wrinkled her brow. “Uhh, are those two waiting for you?”

Following Jenny’s gaze, Connie turned around to look through the front window. Amethyst and Onion stood pressed up to the outside of the glass, both of them watching Connie with a predator’s intensity. Little jets of steam fogged the glass as Amethyst breathed heavily in anticipation, something especially disconcerting for a Gem who didn’t need to breathe.

Onion didn’t fog the glass at all. He stared back at Connie, unmoving, his black eyes pouring into her like another bucket of freezing water.

“Can I leave out the back?” Connie asked.

Kiki opened the back door of the pizzeria for Connie, who leaned out precariously with her stack of boxes to peer left and right. The road behind the row of shops seemed empty enough at first glance, with only the dumpster and a few errant barrels in the immediate area.

Still, Connie wasn’t about to take chances. She leapt through the door, clearing the back stoop in a single bound, and hit the pavement ready to sprint away before her pursuers out front figured out her plan.

As her feet landed, Connie felt a sickening squish beneath her soles. When she tried to move, she nearly toppled onto her face as the pavement greedily clung to her shoes. She peered down through the stack of boxes in her arms to see a sticky translucent goo stretching between the ground and the bottoms of her shoes. She could hardly lift her foot an inch before the thick strands of goo dragged it flat again. 

Her horror grew as she looked around her and realized that everything, from the threshold of Fish Stew Pizza’s back door to the road in front of her, had been coated in thick gobs of the glistening, nigh-invisible substance. Now that she stood in the middle of it, her nose and eyes burned with an acrid, chemical stench. “Ugh! What is this stuff?”

“Gotcha, sucker!” Amethyst appeared on the rooftop, carrying Onion on her hip with an arm slung around the silent boy. “That’s some mega-glue right there. You thought we didn’t have all the exits covered?”

Connie’s eyes darted to one of the barrels she’d glanced past in her haste to leave. The side of the barrel read Industrial Grade Adhesive in large letters above a load of other, smaller text that was probably warnings about eating, breathing, or touching the stuff without protective gear. The top of the barrel had been discarded, and its inside was empty. A thick coating at its base had glued it, maybe forever, to the pavement beside the dumpster.

“Amethyst, this stuff is dangerous!” Connie cried. “Were you gonna just leave me glued here forever?”

“Oh, relax. We brought stuff to clean it up. See?” Amethyst said, pointing to the second barrel.

Connie read the words Industrial Grade Solvent on the second barrel, as well as an equal number of printed warnings below. This barrel was still closed and presumably full, but its base had also been stuck to the ground with the same carpet of adhesive around her, leaving the question of how the solvent might be used at all a mystery. 

Leaning out the door, Kiki glared up at Amethyst above her. “How are we supposed to take the garbage out without getting stuck?” she demanded.

“Just throw your trash in the ocean like all the other humans do,” Amethyst retorted.

“We don’t do that!” Jenny cried indignantly.

“Yeah, right,” Amethyst snarked. “That’s where you guys chuck all your old stuff: garbage, oil, shipwrecks…”

As the Gem ticked more examples on her fingers, Connie slipped her heels free of her shoes and crouched low, gathering her legs beneath her, careful not to tip off the balls of her feet and into the adhesive goop all around her. She eyed a patch of seemingly clear sidewalk on the far side of the pavement, clutched the pizza and doughnut boxes to her chest, and then jumped out of her shoes.

The familiar sensation of weightlessness tingled in her stomach as Connie’s Gem-jump carried her in a high. lazy arc. She concentrated on that feeling, clinging to it with the stone in her chest, and felt gravity itself shifting out of her way as her socks touched down on dry concrete, only staggering a little as she regained her footing.

“Hey!” Amethyst cried. “No fair!”

Connie didn’t stop to argue, already racing around the corner. She sprinted as fast as she could with the boxes braced against her chest, willing them to stay in place as she raced through the little town square and back onto the boardwalk. Beach Citywalk Fries, her final stop, waited just ahead.

She slammed into the front counter of the fry shack hard enough to rattle the windows, startling the heavyset man working the shop. The sun had lent his light complexion a little color and bleached his brown goatee sandy-blond. “Oh! Hello,” he said, quickly regaining his composure. “Aren’t you Steven’s friend? I think I’ve seen you around—”

“Yes, sorry, no time, hello!” Connie panted. “Order! Amethyst! Pickup?”

Ronaldo emerged from the rear of the shack with a long cardboard box stuffed with fries, stepping around the larger man at the counter, who Connie realized must have been his father. The bottom of the box was already darkening with grease spots as Ronaldo wedged a few ketchup packets into it and wrestled the lid closed. “Oh, it’s my monster-hunting assistant, Kelly!” he said upon seeing Connie at the counter. “Did you hear? That farm we were at hunting the Corn Shark got wrecked! I suspect it was a cabal of Brazilian sugar cane plantations trying to disrupt our corn syrup production—”

“Not a conspiracy, just aliens again, order, now, please, now, please!” Connie insisted as politely as she could.

“Aw…” Ronaldo pushed the cardboard box toward her, but then jumped back as something cracked hard against the shack wall by Connie’s knee.

Connie’s gaze followed the noise, and she saw a blossom of wet orange paint oozing on the wall. Something blurred past her, and she jumped aside as another crack resounded on the old wood and another splatter, this one yellow, hit the wall on the other side of her. “Hey!” she cried.

At the far edge of the wooden walk, Amethyst stood with Onion framed in front of her, the Gem’s thick purple hands on his shoulders as he corrected the aim on his paintball gun. The ostensibly nonlethal weapon in his hands had a tube connected where its air canister would have been, and the long tube snaked back to an air compressor sitting behind the pair atop a little toy wagon. Connie recognized the large steel air tank with a chugging motor from one of the many ads she had accidentally booked. The new Six-Gallon Bluster-Buster Portable Air Compressor! It really blows! Now on sale at your local Buy’n’Large!

“What do you think? Does this one hit the mark ? Or do we need to aim higher?” Amethyst chortled sinisterly. Then, to Onion, she said, “But seriously, don’t aim much higher. She’s not that tall.”

Onion didn’t reply. His eyes fixed on Connie as he mashed his finger on the trigger.

His jury-rigged gun unleashed a stream of paintballs that tracked across the front of the fry shack with multicolored gore. Connie jerked, dipped, jumped, and scrambled around the spray. With the extra pressure of such a large tank, Onion’s weapon pounded the old shop, kicking up splinters and faded yellow chips of paint. When the weapon jerked high in the little boy’s grasp, a line of paintballs struck the window, leaving spiderweb cracks in a shaky line beneath their spray.

“Onion!” the elder Fryman bellowed, ducking behind the counter. “Your mother said you weren’t allowed to modify any more weapons after the last time!” He saw Ronaldo trying to film the deadly spray of paintballs, and grabbed his son by the collar, dragging him down before another errant spray pulverized the other windows.

“Ooh, yeah, this one feels like a little too much. Cease fire, teachling!” Amethyst commanded.

Onion lifted his hand away from the trigger and looked up at Amethyst, shrugging as the weapon continued to fire regardless. His other hand was too little to keep hold of the high-pressure spray of his makeshift weapon, which jerked out of his grasp and began to spray wildly in all directions as the pressure from the hose jerked the paintball gun every which way. 

He and Amethyst scrambled around the bouncing gun, trying to stay away from its barrel and get the gun back under control. “Hit the deck!” Amethyst bellowed, as paint spattered everywhere.

Connie thought quickly as she danced between waves of paintballs. She could feel the high pressure inside the air tank, and knew she could unleash it easily. But that would simply turn the metal tank into an air-bomb, and cause even more damage. The hose was moving too quickly and was too small for her to grasp at the air inside. 

So she concentrated instead on the plastic hopper full of paintballs atop the gun. Even with the chugging of the compressor on the wagon, she heard the whistle of air as it poured into the paintball hopper, gathering into a roiling ball in the gaps between paintballs. Then she unleashed it, bursting a low-grade air grenade inside the gun’s ammo container.

The hopper exploded in a rainbow blast, coating Amethyst and Onion in a runny skin of colors. They staggered back, dropping onto their backsides, stunned from the blast, while the makeshift air cannon hissed and flopped on the ground, robbed of ammo and no longer a threat.

Connie swept the fry box on top of the other boxes in her grasp, then sprinted for the beach. She couldn’t help but giggle maniacally as she rounded the cliffside and saw the house swing into view. The food in her arms bounced with each step, tattered and dented from Amethyst’s trials, but still intact. She had passed the Quartz’s bizarre test.

Or so she thought, until a purple missile slammed straight down into the sand ahead of her, kicking up a gritty blast that had her socks backpedaling on the soft beach. Through a curtain of billowing sand, Amethyst stood, though not in any form Connie recognized. The Gem had shapeshifted herself into a tall, muscular body, dressed in a dark wrestling singlet, and with a black mask wrapped around her features. A mighty tuft of white hair clung to the Gem’s bare purple pecs, mirroring the wild mane of white hair that framed her ferocious grin.

“Amethyst?” Connie coughed, blinking the sand from her eyes.

“Uh-uh, squirt. I’m the Purple Puma!” Amethyst declared. “And I came here to put the hurt on some little dingus who thinks she has what it takes to graduate from Camp Crystal Gem!”

And she lunged for Connie, who barely had time to duck back from the Gem wrestler’s burly arms closing around her. Connie nearly lost the stack of boxes in her arms, clapping one hand onto the top box while keeping her other hand shakily supporting the whole stack. 

“Amethyst, this is insane! Why are you doing this?” Connie demanded, ducking and weaving as Amethyst’s swipes drew ever closer to knocking the stack out of her grasp.

“Because I’m big! And mean! And that means I can!” Amethyst gloated. The beefed-up Gem lifted her fists high and slammed them down, looking to flatten all of Connie’s boxes in a single blow.

Connie hopped backwards, then jumped forward through the spray of sand kicked up by Amethyst’s crushing blow as it struck the ground. Her throat rattled with a vicious roar. “That’s—”

As Amethyst looked up, she caught Connie’s toes in her eyes, staggering as Connie balanced atop the Gem’s face. “Hey!” squalled Amethyst.

Hopping again, Connie gathered a swell of air beneath her heels. The breeze swirled into a single point at the tip of Amethyst’s nose, rippling and roiling with intense pressure. “Eeeee…” Connie growled, and crouched.

“C’mere, you—” Amethyst snarled, reaching up to snatch Connie out of the air.

“NUFF!” 

Connie split her concentrated air unevenly. A fraction of the pressure kicked her into the sky, well clear of Amethyst’s onslaught. She clutched the food tightly as she arced high above the beach in the direction of the house, her cheeks flapping and ponytail streaming in the sheer speed of her flight.

The rest of the tremendous air pressure blasted downward, flattening Amethyst.

With the house racing up to meet her, Connie acted quickly. This was no Gem-jump she could control, but an air-powered rocket consisting of her body and its precious cargo. With little nudges of wind, she steered herself toward the broad, flat landing pad of the porch, then summoned little jets of air blasting up at her to slow her descent. Her fall hiccupped with each braking gust, until finally she stumbled onto the deck with a THUMP!

Connie panted, hardly able to fill her lungs fast enough to keep pace with her beating heart as she looked down at the deck, and then up to her hands, where the battered but still edible food remained intact. “I did it,” she murmured, and set the boxes on the patio table. Then she leapt into the air, her fist punching the sky. “I did it! Ha! Amethyst, did you…? Amethyst?”

As she landed and turned, her glee became horror at the sight of her handiwork. The air-blast had carved a crater into the beach twenty feet wide and almost half as deep, with dust still wisping through the air at the memory of the impact. Somewhere inside the crater, a groan clambered out, long and pained.

“A-Are you okay?” Connie called.

A pair of purple hands rose up from the edge of the crater and dragged the rest of the groaning Quartz up and out to lay facedown on the sand, once more in her familiar shape. But slowly, Amethyst’s groan became a chuckle, and then a deep, rolling belly laugh that shook her back to her feet. “That. Was. AWESOME!” Amethyst cheered.

“I’m sorry,” Connie said reflexively. “I didn’t mean to…not that hard, anyway…”

A whorling white ball spin-dashed up the stairs and grappled Connie in a hug before she could say another word. “Are you kidding me? You were incredible out there! I thought I really had you when you lost your shoes, but man! Now come on, let’s eat. All that professor-ing has me starving!”

Connie just blinked as the stocky Gem tore at the cardboard boxes on the table. Amethyst was already three doughnuts deep by the time Connie found her voice again. “But…why? Why do all of that? Why do any of it?”

Amethyst regarded Connie with an odd look as she swallowed. Folding her arms, she said, “You got that good battle-tingle right now?”

Her heart still thumped against her ribs, and she could feel the adrenaline high vibrating behind her eyes. “Yes?” Connie said.

“You feel good about standing up to someone who was messing with you just because they could?” Amethyst demanded.

“...yes?” hedged Connie.

The Gem tapped Connie’s forehead with a thick purple fingertip. “That’s what being a Crystal Gem is all about. Plus, I got you out of your own head for a little while. You really get stuck in there sometimes.”

Connie rubbed her forehead. Did she get stuck in her own thoughts? She didn’t think so. But then, if she did, would she notice? And had she always been that way, or was that another change brought about by inheriting her gemstone? 

Then she realized that Amethyst had finished an entire box of doughnuts while she’d been lost in thought. “Hey, save some for me!” she cried, and dashed for the food before the cackling Quartz could eat it all.

Chapter Text

“So what are you gonna do when you go back home, anyway?”

Amethyst’s sudden question gave Connie pause, and she set her third slice of pizza back into the empty box. Back in her shoes—the bottoms of which still felt extremely sticky—and still covered in breadcrumbs, she felt a satisfying weight in her stomach. She and the Gem had chatted and joked through their junk food lunch, which mostly Amethyst had reduced to scattered cardboard husks on the patio table. When they’d run out of things to say, they’d slipped into an amiable silence, content to stare at the ocean for lack of anything better to do.

“I don’t know,” Connie admitted, shrugging.

“Well, what do you want to do?” Amethyst said.

Spend my days just like this. Looking out at the horizon, with the ocean breeze blowing through her lopsided hair, the thought arose unbidden before Connie smashed it down again. She had been the one who’d asked to leave. Changing her mind now, and inviting herself to stay, would be too rude to even contemplate. The idea alone made her squirm in embarrassment.

“I don’t know,” Connie repeated.

Amethyst grinned, and said, “Now that you and your Gem are simpatico, you could practice doing all that Jade stuff you’ve been working on.”

“Jade stuff?” Connie echoed, unable to stop herself from grinning in reply as she jumped into the change of topic. “What is Jade stuff, anyway?”

Waving her hands vaguely, Amethyst insisted, “You know, exploring new planets, reading everything everywhere, blasting hot wind…although that last one is more of a human thing. Ha!”

“Gross,” Connie giggled. “Well, do you just do Amethyst stuff?”

“You mean spin around and kick butt? Uh, yeah!” bragged Amethyst. 

Connie’s giggles subsided as she pondered what Jade stuff would look like for an earthbound teenager. Planetary exploration wasn’t happening, unless she somehow convinced the Gems to let her borrow the Roaming Eye for the summer. And even then, her parents probably wouldn’t approve any solo flights until she at least had her learner’s permit. Reading would normally be an easy choice for spending her time, but until she got her booking powers under control, any book she read would be tattooed into her memory. 

Idly, her hand dipped back into the pizza box for her forgotten slice, but only found greasy cardboard. When she looked over, she saw Amethyst stuffing the last slice into her mouth. “Hey!”

“What?”Amethyst teased her mouthfully. “I thought you didn’t want it, since you set it down. If you changed your mind about something, maybe you should have said so…”

Connie’s blush quadrupled, and she sank down in her seat, refusing to believe that she was that transparent. 

As she swallowed, Amethyst shrugged and kicked her heels up to the porch rail, lacing her fingers behind her head as she tipped her chair back on two legs. “Well, now you’re the one who gets to decide what Jade stuff is, at least on Earth. Just make sure it’s something that makes you happy.”

Connie smiled, feeling the words spread a warmth through her belly. “You know, you’re a lot smarter than people think, Amethyst,” she said.

“It’s true,” Amethyst agreed with a sage nod. 

“And you’re more mature than you let on,” Connie added.

Amethyst’s eyes flew open, and she tilted backwards, collapsing to the deck. Scrambling, she pushed a curtain of white hair out of her face and scathed Connie with her shocked, furious expression. “What did you say about me?” she demanded.

Confused, Connie shrank to the far side of her seat. “You’re…more mature than—”

“How dare you say something so awful right to my face!” Amethyst exclaimed, leaping to her feet with an explosive motion. “And after I spent all morning setting up that incredible test for you?”

“You convinced a child to basically assault me while I delivered your food,” Connie reminded her.

“Exactly! Of all the ungrateful…” Amethyst fumed, pacing back and forth. Finally, she whirled on Connie, and snapped, “You know what? New test! That old test doesn’t count anymore.”

“What! That’s not fair!” Connie cried, jumping to her feet. The consummate student in her panicked at the idea of failing any test, even one devised by a mad Quartz.

“Uh-uh, don’t even start. You brought this on yourself,” Amethyst told her. The stocky Gem rubbed her jaw in thought for a moment, then snapped her fingers. “Got it. Your test is, you have to help me prank Pearl.”

“I would never!” Connie insisted.

But Amethyst ignored her, and rushed to the screen door, still opaque with its makeshift curtain on the inside. Banging on the glass, Amethyst called, “Oh, Pearl? Connie’s ready for your test now. But first, she brought you a little gift!”

“Oh, how lovely! I’ll be right out!” came Pearl’s reply from inside.

Connie looked around, seeing only herself, the patio table and chairs, the barren cardboard boxes of their lunch, and her malevolent Gem proctor, who rubbed her hands together in gleeful anticipation. “What gift?” Connie hissed, lowering her voice to keep it from Pearl. Even though she had no intention of pranking her mentor, she couldn’t bear the thought of Pearl thinking she might.

Amethyst leapt at Connie, her body already melting into white light as Connie reeled backwards from being seemingly tackled. But Amethyst’s form shrank and slimmed into the shape of a curved purple vase about six inches tall. Black-stemmed lilies with bright white petals poked out of the vase’s top, and Amethyst’s gemstone hung decoratively at the center of the vase.

Connie caught the whole arrangement on instinct, cradling the seemingly delicate vase and flower against her chest. She nearly leapt out of her skin as she felt a small mouth moving against her palm at the bottom of the vase, and heard Amethyst’s muffled voice say, “Just give me to Pearl.”

Tilting the arrangement, Connie glared at the tiny Amethyst face on its bottom. “What are you—”

The door creaked open, and Pearl emerged, careful to arrange the curtain behind her to hide the inside of the house. “Did you have a nice lunch?” Pearl asked. Then she brightened at the flowers Connie held. “Oh, are those for me? They’re lovely!”

“No,” Connie said, chagrinned. “Ame—OUCH!”

Little teeth clamped down on Connie’s palm,and she felt Amethyst’s growl of warning against her skin.

“Amethyst…helped me pick them out,” Connie drawled. She didn’t want to disappoint Amethyst and be a spoilsport, but she also couldn’t stomach the thought of tricking Pearl.

While Connie’s mind raced for some way to keep on both Gems’ good sides, Pearl brushed at the Ame-lily petals. “We should get these in water,” she decided. She reached for the vase, unnoticing of the flop sweat pouring down Connie’s brow, but then paused. “Oh, wait. I’m still not supposed to let you inside. Hmm… Wait right here!”

Pearl slipped back through the door and curtain. As soon as the sound of her steps receded toward the kitchen, the Ame-vase cackled softly to herself. “Yes, this is perfect!” she hissed.

“What are you going to do to her?” Connie demanded in a whisper.

“When Pearl puts water in her ‘flowers,’ I’m gonna shoot it right back in her face! It’s gonna be hilarious!”

“How did you know she would… Have you done this before?” Connie asked.

“So many times! It’s been, like, two hundred years since I got her the last time. I knew she wouldn’t fall for it again unless you handed me to her. You’re the perfect Trojan Goat!”

“You mean Trojan Horse!” Connie retorted. 

“Pfft. That’s not how I remember it. And I spent all night inside of that stupid— She’s coming back! Shhh!”

The door creaked again, and Pearl emerged with a crystal decanter of tap water. “There now. We can keep these lovely blossoms fresh while we administer your next test,” she said, and reached for the vase.

“Uhh…wait!” Connie cried, jerking the vase back from Pearl’s touch, and receiving another sneaky bite on her palm for it. “Before you do that, I, um…have a…question?” The words crawled out of her, squeezed out of her panicking thoughts with the speed and grace of cold molasses.

“Oh?” Pearl’s eyebrows rose eagerly. “What’s that?”

A jumble of words cluttered Connie’s mind, and she struggled to pick even one just to start her sentence. She had always been able to lie to her parents, especially about Gem shenanigans, back when it had been a secret to keep. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing, but it had been a hard-won survival trait back during more draconian times. Had gaining a gemstone actually made her worse at deception? Lying certainly didn’t feel like Jade stuff.

Then that thought blossomed into a real question, and not just something to delay Pearl’s humiliation. “What do you think you’d be doing right now on Homeworld?” she asked suddenly.

The question surprised Pearl as much as it did Connie. She pulled back with a curious expression, and said, “Hmm? I suppose I would be doing what I did before: waiting on important Gems, carrying things for them, making their announcements, and so on. Nothing I’m eager to get back to, certainly.”

When she reached for the vase again, Connie recoiled, and ignored Ame-vase’s teeth in her palm, and insisted, “But what if Homeworld was like it should be? I mean, more like Earth, where you can be whatever you want. Would it be different from what you’re doing now?”

Pearl hummed thoughtfully, drumming her fingers on the cool, sweating glass of her pitcher. “I suppose I never thought about it. When Rose broke away from Homeworld, I never expected to see any of it again. It’s an interesting question. What made you think to ask?”

“Just…trying to figure out Jade stuff,” she admitted. The vase wriggled impatiently in her grasp, but she clutched the disguised Gem tightly and plastered on a smile for Pearl. “I’ve always thought of ‘Gem stuff’ just happening around Beach City. Now that I’m, um, going home, I got to thinking about what it’ll be like being a Gem there. And that got me thinking, what if you could go home too? To the home you deserved?”

Pearl’s face glowed with the warmest smile Connie had ever seen on the graceful Gem. Her gaze wandered the horizon, distant and wistful, as she said, “Well, if that’s the case…I think I would simply…be. Just alone, by myself, wherever I wanted to go, doing whatever I wanted to do.”

Connie’s smile faded as she watched the serene expression on Pearl’s face deepen. Between keeping the house neat, cooking many of their meals, and training them for combat, Pearl did so much for Connie and Steven. “I guess it would be nice not to have to take care of everyone else,” she said guiltily.

“What? Of course I would take care of my friends. I said I’d do what I wanted, didn’t I?” Pearl said teasingly. Her hand rested reassuringly on Connie’s shoulder as she added, “Besides, they would be too busy making Homeworld what it should be, wouldn’t they? Like a certain Quartz and a certain Jade righting wrongs as crusading knights?”

Beaming, Connie bounced excitedly at the idea. She hadn’t thought of what she might do in an alien world that she only knew secondhand. The possibilities felt thrilling. “Or maybe co-presidents? Or librarians?”

Chuckling, Pearl nodded. “I think both sound like wonderful jobs for the two of you.”

“Oh! And Garnet could be a relationship counselor! Or maybe a weatherperson, with her future-vision. Do they have weather on Homeworld?” Connie’s mind buzzed with possibilities for her and their friends. “Peridot could be an inventor! Lapis could start a book club!”

“I’d rather Peridot join the book club instead. She’d be much less dangerous that way,” Pearl chuckled.

Remembering the vase currently chewing on her palm in frustration, Connie decided that maybe flattery would soothe the stubborn prankster. “And Amethyst could be a mighty Quartz general, commanding the forces of Homeworld!”

Pearl doubled over, laughing harder than Connie had ever seen from the prim and proper Gem. Her crystal pitcher of water nearly tumbled to the deck as she wheezed herself to tears. The vase in Connie’s hands went completely still.

Wiping tears from her eyes, Pearl gasped, “Amethyst? A general? Oh, my stars, could you imagine?”

The Ame-vase began to vibrate indignantly, and Connie clutched her tightly to keep her from leaping at Pearl. “Y-You don’t think she’d be a good general? If she wanted to be, I mean?”

“Of course not!” Pearl laughed. “Leading an army requires a staggering amount of logistical organization. And leaders should be temperate and patient, two things Amethyst is decidedly not. She wouldn’t last five minutes in the job before she cracked herself in frustration or accidentally marched all her troops off a cliff!”

As Pearl cackled at her own imaginings, Connie winced at the tremor she felt running through Ame-vase.

At last, her laughter gave out, and Pearl’s smile lost its edge of mockery. “No,” she sighed. “No, I think, if Homeworld were what we wanted it to be, Amethyst would be an artist.”

“An artist?” Connie repeated, incredulous. The vase in her arms went still again. “Like a painter?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Pearl hummed. “Except her body would be her canvas. I’ve never seen a Gem as talented as she is at shapeshifting. Besides, in a perfect Homeworld, we wouldn’t need soldiers or generals. Amethyst could turn into anything she might think of to make us laugh, or cry. And everyone would finally see how beautiful she truly is.”

As Connie stood speechless at Pearl’s earnest words, the graceful Gem took the vase from her hands, cupping it under her palm.

“She would shock the stuffy ‘upper crusts’ out of their complacency, and show the rest of us that the forms we’re given don’t have to be all that we are. Amethyst emerged on Earth after the war. She’s our dream of a Gem completely unshackled by the old hierarchy,” Pearl said as she delicately poured water into the purple vase. “It’s something I’ve always loved about her. And if I’m being honest, something I’ve always envied.”

“Wow,” Connie murmured, lost in the image of Amethyst shapeshifting herself for crowds of other Gems. She would inspire whole colosseums, like the leader of a great movement, or a prop comic whose body became anything they needed for a joke. Perhaps both at once.

Pearl suddenly jerked the vase away from the pitcher, balancing it on her palm as she offered it back to Connie. “Oh, dear! Connie, I’m afraid your flower vase is leaking…”

When Connie looked, she saw water pooling around the base of the purple shape in Pearl’s hand and dripping onto the wooden deck. “Sorry. Sorry!” she exclaimed, and snatched the vase back from Pearl. “I’ll just go…take care of it?”

“Alright. But hurry back! I still have to administer your test!” Pearl called after her as Connie hurried down the stairs. Behind her, she heard the door creak open once more as Pearl slipped back inside to return the pitcher to the kitchen.

As soon as the door bounced shut, the vase leapt out of Connie’s grasp and ballooned into white light until it filled the shape of Amethyst once more. She landed on the sand with her back to Connie, her hair draped over her shoulders and curtaining any glimpse of her face. “Nice job,” Amethyst said in a thick voice. Her fist rose and swiped at her unseen cheek. “We totally soaked her hand. Prank achieved. You pass.”

“Amethyst…”

When Connie gently touched Amethyst’s shoulder, the stocky Gem flinched. “Welp, gotta go. Lots to do,” Amethyst insisted, and sniffled. “I’ll see you tonight for the final exam, or whatever. Later!”

And Amethyst whirled into a ball, spin-dashing up the beach in a spray of sand and disappearing around the cliffside.

Not sure if she’d done something wrong or right, Connie slunk back to the door and waited patiently for Pearl.

When the pale Gem returned, she looked Connie up and down, and clucked her tongue. “You’re in quite a state. This won’t do at all. Let’s see…”

Pearl lightly touched Connie’s shoulders. A sudden tingle raced across Connie’s skin, like a ripple in a pond. All of the sand, and glue, and the coating of breadcrumbs that still covered her clothes and body leapt up from her and flowed into Pearl’s palms. Bringing her hands together, Pearl merged the swirling messes into a single ball. A perfectly clean Connie remained, slightly ruffled by the experience, but otherwise pristine.

“There!” declared Pearl. She flung the ball of clingy leftovers from Amethyst’s test out toward the beach. The halo of wary seagulls that had been circling the house at a considerable distance all swarmed after the ball to claim it first as it hit the sand.

“Wow, thanks!” Connie said, looking down at herself. She’d been debating how to finagle a change of clothes while still being locked out of the house. The mere thought of anyone else bringing her clean underwear from her footlocker rankled her teenage pride. A magical—and literal—dry-cleaning was far better.

“No student of mine goes into an exam looking any less than her best,” Pearl said, nodding firmly. “But I hope you’re ready.”

Drawing herself upright, Connie said, “I’m ready, ma’am.”

“Oh, no. Today, you’re the ma’am,” Pearl said, smiling at Connie’s confused look. “Because your test is: you have to teach me.”

“Teach you?” Connie echoed incredulously. “Teach you what?”

“Anything you like! It just has to be something I don’t already know,” said Pearl.

Connie’s mind raced fruitlessly, trying and failing to think of anything she could teach to an immortal being who had been on Earth since the dawn of recorded human history. Pearl did so many things, and had always taught Connie with a seemingly inexhaustible well of patience. What hope did Connie have of ever approaching Pearl’s wisdom and skill?

But that’s the point, isn’t it? Connie thought as she stared up at Pearl’s look of serene anticipation. Her mentor didn’t expect Connie to teach her Pearl stuff. Connie could only offer Jade stuff, or rather, the Connie stuff version of Jade stuff. Would that be enough?

Then she remembered the true purpose of this so-called final exam, and the teasing Amethyst had given her for overthinking things. Shaking her thoughts clear of hesitation, she struck upon an idea. “Okay, I think I can do that. But I’m going to need something from my footlocker. Would you please get it for me?”

Pearl’s eyes sparkled as she said primly, “Yes, ma’am!”

“Oh, it’s lovely!” Pearl exclaimed, and lifted her latest efforts for Connie’s appraisal. “What do you think?”

Connie grinned at Pearl’s perfect paper crane. “It’s textbook. Another masterpiece!” she declared.

They sat on the boards of the patio, both cross-legged, with a small zoo of origami animals surrounding them. The package of special paper retrieved from Connie’s locker sat between them, happily half-emptied for the different creatures it had spawned. Normally, a light breeze could have blown away their menagerie, but Connie had sent the wind elsewhere, leaving them in peace and stillness.

“I never would have imagined you could recreate so many animals in paper. Although a few of them are a bit abstract…” said Pearl. She poked at what Connie had insisted was an origami crab, even though they both agreed it barely looked the part.

”And you can make things besides animals too,” Connie explained. Her hands were already at work, and finished just after her words. Grinning, Connie extended an origami lotus to her student. “See?”

”Oooh,” Pearl cooed, and accepted the flower, cradling it in her palms. 

“And these don’t even need water!” Connie added. 

The graceful Gem ran her fingers along her lotus’s paper petals, handling the gift as though it were something precious. “I’m starting to see why Peridot and Lapis spent so much time on their ‘morps.’”

A warm embarrassment filled Connie’s cheeks. She ducked her head bashfully, and said, “To be honest, I wasn’t sure if you would like this. Origami, I mean. Or worse, if you already knew it, since you were around when it was, um, invented.”

”I’ve certainly seen it before,” Pearl admitted, “but the swordsmen I met in that era seemed more interested in painting. And beheading. I didn’t care for either pastime, to be honest.”

“It’s also not a very useful skill,” Connie continued, still abashed. She fiddled with a tiny, pinky-long paper replica of her sailcloth sword.

”Well, not everything needs to be practical, does it?” the oh-so-practical Gem hedged as she admired her crane. “And it’s fun!”

”I guess. It doesn’t really matter, though,” Connie said modestly.

Pearl’s features sobered abruptly, so suddenly that Connie wondered if she had said or done something wrong. The pale Gem fiddled with her crane’s wingtips as she chewed on her bottom lip. Finally, she looked up, and said, “Connie…when I first began teaching you, I…I said some things that may have given you the wrong impression.”

Connie frowned, trying to remember what Pearl might have been talking about. She couldn’t think of any errant philosophies of the blade her mentor had mistakenly broached. But then, looking at Pearl’s guilty expression, she realized what it had been.

"Remember, Connie: in the heat of battle, Steven is what matters. You don’t matter."

Pearl had drilled the words into Connie with almost every lesson until it became her mantra. Steven had set them both straight, of course, but the memory of those words still remained. “Oh,” Connie said.

Her gaze hung low as Pearl cradled her origami, looking more ashamed than Connie had ever seen her. “Yes. Well. I…I hope you know how sorry I am to even suggest such a thing.”

Connie’s heart ached for the Gem, who had given everything of herself, first for Rose, and then for Steven. She could hardly recall a time she had seen Pearl doing anything for herself.

”You know it was never true,” Pearl said plaintively, “don’t you?”

Shifting forward, Connie took the crane from Pearl and set it aside, then slid her hands into Pearl’s. The Gem’s hands were warm and porcelain-smooth against Connie’s swordswoman callouses.

”For either of us,” Connie agreed with a firm nod. 

Tears rimmed Pearl’s eyes as she nodded in kind, and squeezed Connie’s hands. Then she rose primly from the floor, pulling Connie with her, and swiped at her glistening cheeks. “You,” she told Connie, “are a very wise teacher.”

”I had a good example to follow,” Connie said, beaming.

Pearl had to wipe her eyes again, sniffling. Then, grinning with pride, she planted her hands on her hips and declared, “You’ve passed. Congratulations!”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Connie. “So, what’s next?”

”Your final test,” Pearl said, lending her words an ominous tone as she tipped her gaze skyward.

Connie looked up to follow the Gem’s eyes up to the laundry perch on the stone guardian’s hand. There, Garnet still sat atop the washing machine, motionless, as she had been since that morning.

”Should I be worried?” Connie asked jokingly.

But Pearl’s grave voice chilled her humor to dread. “I would be. She’s been up there for hours devising your test. Her job today is to make you prove that you deserve to be a Crystal Gem. To test your mettle, your spirit, your very essence! Who knows what challenge she could demand of you?”

Connie swallowed hard, shivering as her innards froze. She stared at the motionless Gem above her, remembering how blunt, how effortlessly powerful, their resident perma-fusion could be. What would be a test to an ancient being with the wisdom of two, who could swim in lava and crush mountains with her gauntlets?

”Oh,” Pearl said, lifting her foot. “I accidentally crushed my little friend!” She rescued her crane from the deck and tugged at its crumpled wingtips, trying to put them back into shape, while her student spiraled into her own imagination of dread.

Chapter Text

It’s fine, Connie reassured herself as she stared up at the statuesque Gem atop the temple’s stone guardian. It’ll all be fine.

She stood alone at the porch railing, her fingers worrying against the grain of the wood. Pearl had left Connie to her final test of the day and returned inside to continue the mysterious preparations. An occasional whisper or giggle slipped out through the window blinds, but never anything that gave Connie any inkling of what was happening inside.

Her thoughts wandered far from whatever Steven and the Gems were scheming behind the curtained door. Instead, she thought back to her time with Garnet, combing through each moment for some kind of clue of what her test might be. 

Amethyst already told you, she reminded herself, that you spend too much time overthinking everything. Why would Garnet’s test be any worse than hers or Pearl’s?

Because Garnet is quiet. And intense. And serious, her treacherous mind answered itself.

So? Garnet is nice.

Garnet is polite. Because you’re Steven’s friend. She doesn’t care that you’re leaving any more than she cares about you staying. 

Would her not caring make the test harder, or easier?

Maybe the test will be impossible, like, “Bench press the house.” Or maybe she’ll just get it over with as quickly as possible. “Touch your finger to your nose. Done. Good job. See you later.”

A sudden breeze tickled her neck, prodding her out of her reflective self-argument. Without her concentration to keep it at bay, the wind had slipped free of her control, brushing through her lopsided hair, and whispering against the side of the house.

Both halves of her split opinion came together into the same anxious thought. Garnet had been up there all day. Waiting. For Connie.

Swallowing, Connie gathered herself, then leapt into the air. The weightless sensation of a Gem-jump stretched her ascent into a long, torturous journey. When she finally landed atop the warp pad next to the laundry machines, her anxiety had worked itself into a wild tumble that churned the doughnuts and pizza in her stomach. 

Garnet didn’t even twitch at Connie’s arrival. Her mirrored visor stared forward, looking through Connie as though she weren’t even there. 

This is so stupid. Garnet’s your friend. She just also happens to be an immensely powerful ancient being who can see the future and level entire buildings with her fists. And she expects you to impress her in some way with a challenge she’s sat up here all day thinking about that’s so serious she hasn’t moved at all and isn’t saying anything why is she being quiet is being quiet bad should I be quiet too or should I ask or does Garnet still not like questions do I annoy her with questions oh, STARS, I’ve been standing here for a really long time not saying anything either just staring at her like a slack-jawed doofus say something say anything now RIGHT NOW!

“I have to go somewhere!” Connie blurted.

“Okay,” said Garnet.

Connie felt glad for the curtain of warp space that lifted her out of the world and hid the rising color in her cheeks.

“Well, hello, Gusty,” Bismuth said, looking up from the grinding wheel in the back corner of her forge. “I thought that might be you. It doesn’t usually thunder around here for twenty minutes straight.

Hopping down the last few steps, Connie plunged into the heat of Bismuth’s sanctuary and immediately felt her mangled ponytail begin to frizz against her neck. “Then why did it take you so long to open the door?” she asked, fighting to keep the impatience out of her voice.

She stopped short at the sight of the Forge, which had grown even more crowded since she’d last visited. The weapon racks had long since been buried under blades and bludgeons, and the weapons stacked on the floor in front of the overflowing racks rose nearly as high as the racks themselves. At some point, even the lackadaisical method of leaning new weapons against the wall had become too much for Bismuth. Spears, axes, truncheons, each one a masterpiece, lay strewn across the broad floor of the forge.

The swordsmith, it seemed, had been extremely busy.

Shrugging, Bismuth set aside the enormous claymore she’d been sharpening, and let her wheel spin down to a halt. “Maybe my feelings still hurt a little from the last time I opened my door to you. Call it petty revenge. We’re square now.”

Why is it easier to talk to Bismuth, who doesn’t like you, Connie’s obnoxious thoughts pointed out to her as she carefully tiptoed her way between weapons, than it is to talk to Garnet, who may or may not like you?

Because Bismuth tells you exactly where you stand with her. Garnet is a mystery. And I want Garnet to like me, those same thoughts answered themselves.

Bismuth picked up a longsword next and set her foot to the wheel’s pedal. With a few quick pumps, the stone wheel whirled into motion. Sparks coughed from the blade as Bismuth set its edge against the spinning flat of the wheel to hone her creation. “So what brings you back to my little corner of Earth?” the swordsmith asked above the noise of her work.

Connie drifted into the shrill sound of steel against stone. The commotion helped to drown out the overactive debate inside her head. Her silence went so deep that eventually, even Bismuth’s curiosity overwhelmed her need to work, and she lifted the sword from her wheel to turn a questioning look at Connie.

“I think I just ran away…” said Connie.

Planting a hand on her hip, Bismuth looked Connie up and down, smirking. “Now what on this planet can scare a Gem who throws tornadoes and swings the deadliest blanket I’ve ever seen?”

Connie recounted the last few days while Bismuth resumed her work. The words came slowly at first, especially in describing her blowup at Steven. But as she went on, she felt the story flowing more easily out of her. By the time she finished with her hasty warp escape from Garnet, she felt surprisingly lighter. 

“And I went to the first place I could think of, which brought me to you,” she finished. The sheer size of her story left her short of breath. 

“And here you are,” Bismuth said noncommittally, laying aside a falchion with a razor’s edge. She’d finished sharpening five different swords during Connie’s story. “But why me?”

“Beeeeeee-cause I missed you?” hedged Connie. 

Her too-wide smile wobbled at Bismuth’s skeptical raised eyebrow. But after a long moment of scrutiny, Bismuth let her off with a laugh and a shake of her head. “No, you didn’t. I made sure of that the last time we talked,” the smith pointed out. “Don’t hand me schist and call it steel, Gusty. What’s going on?”

Connie wilted, and her excuses turned to sand in her mouth, leaving with only the unpalatable truth. “I think…I wanted to go somewhere I knew nobody else would follow me,” she admitted to Bismuth and herself.

Nodding, Bismuth picked a spear from the wall and made a show of examining its construction, as though she hadn’t made it herself. “Well, you succeeded there,” she agreed.

“It’s just…Garnet!” Connie exploded, flinging her hands in a frustrated gesture. “She’s always so cool, and calm, and quiet, and I never know if she’s okay with me or if she’s mad about something or if she’s bored being around me or…something else! She says nice things, but I’ve messed up so many times with her, I just…”

“Messed up?” Bismuth’s curiosity piqued, and she set the spear aside. “Like how?”

“Like when I made the Giga Wasp mad and almost got us killed, or the time I sneeze-exploded our hiding spot while we were spying on Shard’s Gems, or when I accidentally helped the mailman romance her, or when I popped…”

Connie’s tumbling words ended in a hiccup, and her eyes widened with concern at the huge smith. Bismuth simply nodded, understanding at once. “When you popped my bubble,” said Bismuth.

“Yeah,” Connie groaned guiltily.

But Bismuth merely chuckled, and set the spear aside. She pushed a mess of daggers off her anvil so she could prop herself atop it, hunching over with her hands draped over her knees. “I get it,” she said. “Garnet was always important to Rose. ‘The dream of real freedom for Gems,’ that kind of stuff. She must have taken it almost as bad as Pearl did when me and R…’Steven’ got back into it.”

Connie squirmed, lost for anything to say. She wanted to argue, to press that Steven was his own person, not just his mother reborn. That Garnet was only trying to protect Steven from Bismuth’s misplaced grudge. 

But knowing what it felt like to be trapped and bodiless, what Jade and Lapis had both endured, and what Bismuth had been re-sentenced to after her fight with Steven… Connie couldn’t say that Bismuth was completely wrong to feel the way she did.

Bismuth gave Connie a long, appraising look through the silence. A trace of pity pulled at the smith’s thick features. “Let me tell you a secret about Garnet,” she said. “She’s never quiet. The rest of us just aren’t invited to the conversation. Understand?”

Realization wrinkled Connie’s brow. “Because she’s a fusion?”

“Exactly. Every time Garnet’s quiet, it’s just Ruby and Sapphire wrapped up in each other. You ever fuse with somebody else?” Bismuth said. At Connie’s nod, she smirked, and continued, “Then you know what I’m talking about. Though I still haven’t met a fusion as self-absorbed as that piece of work.”

Pursing her lips, Connie thought back to each of the times she and Steven had fused. Stevonnie had always found some kind of adventure or excitement to chase. But looking back on it, she realized that Stevonnie would have been just as happy to sit on the beach and simply exist.

“Seen it happen to a bunch of new recruits who were all worried about impressing Rose’s big, bad fusion commander. Even happened to me! After I joined up, I spent ages thinking I wasn’t good enough for Garnet, that I didn’t belong on the battlefield, that she thought I should just stick to building bases instead of defending them. I used to hate how quiet she was around me, thinking she could see right through me, see how scared I was in the beginning,” Bismuth admitted.

“Scared? You?” Connie said incredulously. 

“Hey, I wasn’t built for fighting any more than Pearl was, okay? Took me a while to find my Quartz-smashing groove,” Bismuth retorted. Then she rubbed the back of her neck, growing chagrined. “When I finally confronted Garnet about all of it, she had no idea what I was talking about. Never thought any of it. All that stuff I put on her? It was coming from me.”

Connie sagged under the revelation. Everything she felt in Garnet’s silences were more about herself than anything the fusion had ever expressed. That silence just made for a handy canvas upon which Connie could project all of her worst thoughts about herself, just as she’d been doing with the memory of Jade’s voice.

Then Connie scowled, and fumed, “I can’t believe I’m still messed-up in the head! This stinks! How many more huge emotional revelations do I need before I’m just normal again?”

Bismuth laughed, and the sound of it filled her sweltering workshop. “I’ve had too many to count, and I’m still there with you, Gusty. Don’t crack yourself trying to make it happen,” she said, and hauled herself off her anvil seat. Her hands found a gladius among her mess of swords, and she ambled over to her grinding wheel once more. “Now, don’t you have a test to take?” 

Taking the hint, Connie started for the open stairwell, ready to make the trek down the volcano to the warp pad. But as she walked past a double row of swords standing at either wall, she hesitated. Turning back, she watched Bismuth running her gladius against the spinning wheel, kicking sparks across the cluttered floor. “Bismuth?”

“Hmm?” the smith asked, not looking up from her work.

“How much longer can you avoid them?” asked Connie.

She meant the question to be a gentle thing. But it struck Bismuth hard, causing her gladius to kick off the wheel, flying out of her hands and smacking into the far wall. The hulking smith stared at her lost sword, seeming lost. Her gaze wandered around the circle of weapons lining her walls, before landing on the bins of ore she kept near the furnace. The buckets of powdered metals were all but empty now.

Bismuth’s hands clenched and unclenched in an unconscious, anxious fidget. Finally, without looking at Connie, the smith answered. “I have one more thing I gotta make. Then, we’ll talk,” she murmured.

Connie lingered, waiting for more. But Bismuth just stared into her forge, her thoughts already somewhere far away. So she left the smith in solitude, climbing the stairs without another word.

By the time Connie warped back to the laundry pad, the sky glowed at the edges with the coming sunset. The sulfurous volcanic miasma that had followed her through warp space vanished into a cool ocean breeze. She sighed in relief, glad to be back.

Garnet sat atop the washer, cross-legged and motionless, without an inch of difference from how she’d been since that morning. She didn’t even twitch at the chime or flash of the warp pad, and her mirrored visor made it impossible to tell where she was looking.

Silently, Connie crawled on top of the dryer and crossed her legs, matching the fusion’s posture. Her breathing slowed as her gaze dwindled into the horizon. 

Color filled the sky by inches as the sun dipped behind the ocean. A blaze of orange consumed the blue, shimmering against the clouds and rippling in the waves. Brilliant yellow haloed the sun while it shifted from orange, to pink, and finally to a brilliant red as the last sliver of day clung to the edge of the world. 

Connie said nothing, content with the silence. Her turbulent feelings settled into contentment, far removed from the emptiness she had felt upon awakening that morning. She didn’t feel empty, and didn’t worry about feeling whole. Instead, her thoughts settled, and began to wander into the pleasant breeze.

“You’re quiet today.”

Garnet’s voice startled Connie out of her half-doze, half-meditation with a snort. She glanced to her side, and saw the fusion’s head tilted ever so slightly in Connie’s direction. Reflexively, she started to answer. But then she caught herself, and simply nodded.

It was a while more until Garnet spoke again. Twisting around, she looked to the house below, and then back toward the horizon. “Everyone else is waiting for us inside.”

Connie nodded again.

After another long pause, Garnet smirked, and swiveled herself atop the washer so that she faced Connie directly. “Touché,” she said. “Maybe I could be a more active communicator.”

Scooting herself atop the dryer, Connie turned to face Garnet in kind. “You are kind of intimidating,” Connie admitted, breaking her silence.

“Sometimes intimidating is good. It makes people think twice about starting trouble around you,” Garnet said. “But I don’t want my friends to feel that way.” A tiny smile cracked her stoic facade.

A wave of vindication wiped away Connie’s self-imposed serenity. She leaned forward eagerly, growing restless. “So what’s my test going to be? Proving I can warp anywhere I want, or wind-blading the ocean in half? Whatever it is, I know I can handle it, just like Pearl and Amethyst’s fake—eep!” 

She clapped her hands over her mouth, but too late. Garnet’s features became pensive as she said, “You figured out what we’re doing."

Waffling, Connie squeaked, “I mean, maybe a little? Steven isn’t great at lying, so I kinda already…”

“We did something like this for him a while ago,” Garnet admitted. “I’m starting to suspect he saw through us like you did.”

“Well, I appreciate how seriously you’re all taking it. Even if it feels a little silly, it means a lot to me,” Connie said. Her cheeks reddened, and she ducked bashfully.

“Steven asked us to show you that you deserve to be here. He wanted these tests to prove to yourself that you’re worthy of being a Crystal Gem.”

Connie’s heart thumped with excitement. “So, what is it? I’m ready,” she insisted.

But Garnet remained silent. Her brows dipped behind her visor in a frown.

“Garnet?” said Connie, growing worried.

Garnet spoke softly, but decisively. “When Lapis Lazuli stole the ocean, you volunteered to help Steven get it back before even we could. You learned that Homeworld was on their way, and chose to pick up a sword instead of run. You fought Jasper, corrupted Gems, even your own family, just to stand by Steven. And when Jade became a part of you, you never once asked us if breaking her would save you, even when her corruption started to take the both of you.”

Connie’s breath caught in her throat. Breaking Jade? She couldn’t fathom breaking any Gem, let alone someone who had been alive inside of her. 

“I’ve been sitting here all day trying to think of one more thing I could ask of you to prove yourself. And I couldn’t think of anything,” said Garnet.

The powerful fusion stood, towering over Connie. And then offered her a hand.

“If you want to be a Crystal Gem,” Garnet told her, “then you should be a Crystal Gem.”

Connie stared up at Garnet, unable to speak. Her face split into a beaming grin, and she took Garnet’s hand, rising to stand beside her fellow Gem, and answered with a decisive nod.

“Good,” Garnet said, and her own stoic features split into a grin. Then she glanced back at the house again, and said, “But we should really go. They’ve been waiting a while, and I think they expected us to be done much sooner.”

Suddenly aware of the coming night, Connie felt a twinge of guilt. “Right, let’s go!” she agreed. But as the fusion started for the edge of the statue’s hand, Connie was struck with a sudden thought. “Wait a sec! Garnet?”

Garnet looked over her shoulder with a rare expression of curiosity.

Connie hesitated a moment, but decided that Garnet’s friendship, no longer questionable, deserved her total honesty. “Letting Bismuth go was an accident, and I’m still sorry about that,” Connie said. “But…I don’t think it was a mistake. Not anymore.”

The smile Garnet replied with carried heavy regret. “I hope you’re right,” she said, completely earnest.

They jumped together, thumping gently onto the porch. Garnet pushed through the screen door, inadvertently tearing away the tape-mounted blanket curtain that had hid the house from Connie all day. “She’s ready,” Garnet announced to the room, and then nodded for Connie to follow her inside

As she stepped across the threshold, Connie’s breath caught again, and her eyes grew huge. She stumbled to a halt and stared in wonderment, her heart thundering in her chest.

The beach house had been transformed. Its lights were out, and in their stead, white candles and paper lanterns lit the room with a soft, warm glow. They had run out of candleholders long before they’d set up all the candles, and so many of them sat on paper plates to catch the dripping wax. Still, it felt magical to Connie, as though she’d stepped foot into a cozy wizard’s lair straight out of a fantasy book.

Above her, the ceiling almost seemed to move. She squinted into the dark, and then gasped as she saw a flock of paper cranes suspended from the rafters. Many had been her own, folded off and on since she’d arrived at the house, but nearly as many must have been Pearl’s, folded in only a few hours since she’d taught the Gem how. They spun lazily from fishing line so thin that they may as well have been actually flying, becoming a paper murmuration frozen in time.

At the back of the house, at the mouth of the temple, Connie saw what had been blocking her from warping directly into the house. Or rather, she saw the vague shape of it: a large, squarish silhouette covered by an old work tarp that had been decorated with a single green paper bow. Peridot stood next to the covered shape, bouncing excitedly with one hand wrapped into the tarp as if to rip it away. The basket nestling Lapis’s stone wobbled on her chest with the motion. Clearly, Peridot had been waiting for Connie to arrive so she could reveal what lay beneath, and clearly, she had been instructed to wait despite her anxiousness. Behind the little engineer, another blanket curtain had been taped over the temple door, obscuring it from view behind a woolen barrier, though Connie couldn’t fathom why.

The coffee table had been removed, and Steven stood in the empty living room, flanked on either side by a grinning Pearl and Amethyst. Steven beamed at her reflexively, but then caught himself and hardened his face into something more austere. “Dad! Now!” he hissed out the side of his mouth.

Greg Universe, who had been quietly dozing on the couch, jerked awake with such force that he would have lost the guitar in his lap if he hadn’t already slung the strap over his shoulder. But even freshly ripped from sleep, the old musician still delivered, strumming his instrument without a second’s pause. A gentle melody emerged from beneath his fingertips, and Connie recognized it immediately. It was the song she and Steven had danced to the first time they had fused.

“Connie Maheswaran!” Steven announced officiously, puffing out his chest. “Please step forward!”

Heart bursting, eyes watering, Connie approached him, trying her best to mirror his gravely serious demeanor. Despite her efforts, she couldn’t keep the grin off her face.

“You have completed each test, and have been found worthy,” Steven informed her. “Now, for your final challenge!”

Connie forcibly swallowed her smile, and nodded solemnly.

“Do you,” he boomed, “Connie Maheswaran, promise to defend the Earth and all its peoples, places, plants, and animals both cute and otherwise, from any threat that might come?”

“I promise,” declared Connie.

Nodding, Steven continued, “Do you swear to stand beside your fellow Gems? To protect them, and support them, and help them however you can?”

“I swear!” Connie exclaimed.

“And do you swear,” Steven said, “to let them do the same for you? To let them care for you, and help you when you need it? Even when we might disagree, or be mad, or sad, or hurt?” His voice lost its dramatic edge at the tail of it, becoming plaintive.

Connie felt herself soften at the worry in his eyes. “I swear,” she said again, this time quietly, sincerely.

“And do you promise to be my best friend, as long as I’m your best friend, for as long as you want?” he added, his voice rising with hope.

Her grin broke through her formal facade. “Even longer than that,” she told him.

Steven beamed, and reached into his pocket with dramatic flourish to produce a bright green sticker of a five-pointed star. He peeled the wax paper backing, and then carefully pressed it to her shirt just below the collar to the side of her gemstone. Color filled his cheeks as he pulled his hand away, and said, “This one is just until we find you your own star. I thought you’d like a green one, since—”

Connie threw herself at Steven, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her face into his hair. The tears she had been holding back streamed down her cheeks as she laughed. “It’s perfect,” she told him. “Thank you.”

He couldn’t answer as his arms wrapped around her waist. But she felt a wet spot growing in her shirt where his face was, and understood.

A soft pop erupted on either side of them, and Connie looked up into a shower of confetti as Pearl and Amethyst each released a party popper at the teens. 

Grinning, sniffling, bespeckled with colorful paper, Connie looked around her. Greg had risen from the couch, setting his guitar aside to join the others. Even Peridot tore herself away from whatever surprise she had prepared on the warp pad, and jumped into the circle gathering around the pair. “Thank you, all of you,” Connie told them earnestly.

“We’re proud of you, Connie,” Pearl said.

“Yeah, way to go!” Greg said, cocking his elbow in a fatherly gesture. “I’m not completely sure what all this means, but I still know you’re doing great!”

“It means that Connie has become her own Gem,” Garnet told him.

Connie wiped uselessly at her face, too overwhelmed to stop her tears. “You guys are the best,” she said, her voice wobbling. “I promise, I won’t let you down. Even after I…”

The smiles and warmth of their circle dimmed as they all remembered a moment after Connie had. “After you go home tomorrow,” Steven said, his words mournful. 

“Yeah,” Connie mumbled, looking down at her shoes. “When I go home.”

A brief pall darkened the candlelit room. But then Amethyst rolled her eyes, and said in a too-loud voice, “Of course, if you wanted to stick around like you were going to before, that would be cool too.”

Connie swallowed thickly. It took all of her courage to look up from the floor and see the reaction to Amethyst’s words. She didn’t want them to think her wishy-washy, or overly dramatic. The only thing she saw, however, were the encouraging smiles of her friends.

“Would…W-Would that be okay?” she asked in a tiny voice. “If I decided to st—”

“YES!” Steven exploded, sweeping her up in another hug that lifted her from the ground. “Yes, yes, yes! Yeeesssssssss!”

She laughed, and clung to his head to keep from tipping out of his embrace as he spun them around the floor. “Okay! Okay!” she squealed. “I’ll stay!”

As Steven hoisted her in joy, twirling with her across the floor, Connie couldn’t help but look around her. The familiar walls bathed in candlelight, the battered old furniture, the ancient and mysterious temple with its secrets now hers as much as any Crystal Gem’s, all reverberating with the laughter of people impossibly dear to her… She could never feel like a stranger in this house again.

She had gone home after all, just as she’d said.

“I’ll stay,” Connie murmured, and leaned into Steven.