As her bleary vision coalesced, Connie saw the bright rectangle of her laptop's monitor glowing in front of her. A powerful ache throbbed in her back and neck from sitting ramrod straight in her chair. Her fingertips rested on the trackpad, scrolling through an article on the screen faster than she could make out the individual words. Dried tears made her eyes sticky as she blinked herself awake.

"Where… Why am I…" she mumbled, and looked around her room. She was seated at her desk with the bed abandoned behind her, the sheets and comforter kicked to the floor. Scrolling up the laptop screen, Connie saw the header for a Ficklepedia article on human psychology, with other tabs in the browser for similar articles on neurology, neuroscience, language, and sandcastles.

"Wait, why are the fingers no longer responding?" The thought resonated in Connie's head, sounding and feeling like any other thought she might have. But the thought was not hers. "Oh. Are you conscious again, human?"

Connie rubbed at her eyes. "Why am I out of bed?" she mumbled to herself. "And why am I reading this?"

"You were not." The thought came to her riding a wave of annoyance. "I have spent the last several decicrons devising a means of communicating with the lump of fats and protein at the center of your cranium using the meager tools provided to me. Lucky for both of us, it appears I was successful."

She froze at the thoughts. Her room was silent save for the sounds of birdsong outside as morning light spilled in through her window. The inner voice she heard felt like her own, but it was not coming from her. Reaching up, she tapped the gemstone through her shirt and whispered, "Jade?"

"Ah. It seems you already know what and/or who I am," came the silent reply. "Good. That will save us some time. I require your assistance, human. Does your tribe, or pod, or whatever you call your group unit, nest in close proximity to a Gem outpost?"

Clutching her temples, Connie pushed away the last of her headache and mentally clutched at the voice, her heart thundering in excitement. "I can't believe it. You're actually talking to me!"

"'Talking' is not the most accurate term for our communication. I have found a way of using nerve impulses to imitate your brain's primitive form of sub-vocalization by—"

"This is incredible!" Connie exclaimed, drowning out the thought. "Can I do it too?" She closed her eyes and concentrated hard on the words, "Can you hear me?"

A choking sound filled her mind in reply. "Nngh, stop! Stop, stop, stop, stop! If you do not know what you are doing, your attempts simply add white noise to the process. Besides, I can understand you fine when you vocalize your thoughts."

"But I—"

"We have now wasted all of that time I thought I had saved by not needing an introduction. So listen very carefully, human: I have somehow gotten stuck inside of you, and I require assistance in being extracted. If you can locate the nearest Gem facility, they will be able to remove me from you with minimal damage to your body. Probably."

Connie frowned. "You don't remember how you got here?" she asked.

"Given your species' proclivity for sticking things in your mouths, I can only assume you tried to eat me. My attempt to reform must have been hindered by this disgusting, sloshing bag of liquids and bones."

A surge of irritation bubbled in Connie's empty stomach. She had pictured her first meeting with the Gem inside of her ever since Jade had begun to stir, but somehow this wasn't the moment of first contact for which she had tried to prepare.

That annoyance at her rude passenger brought back a flash of the nightmare that had thrown her to the floor. "You were the person I met on the beach last night, weren't you? In my dream," she said. "What were you trying to make me do when I was walking on the ocean?"

"Oh! You, uh, remember that encounter. The connection via your subconscious was my first attempt at communication, and I had hoped…I mean, I thought you might not remember. In any case, it did not work, and now that I have established contact, it is irrelevant. We must make haste. However or for whatever reason you ingested me, I do not want to risk exiting by natural means if at all possible." A shudder of discontent rattled alongside the thought.

As a teenage girl, Connie was no stranger to being evasive when a topic of conversation turned uncomfortable. If anything, she had earned a gold medal in verbal gymnastics to keep herself from accidentally blurting Jade's existence to her parents. "Don't change the subject," Connie said. "You were making me sleepwalk last week. What were you trying to do?"

"I do not recall those events. I only became aware of my predicament within the last twelve of your 'hours,' and will not assume responsibility for your nocturnal wanderings. I do not even know how to sleep, to say nothing of doing so in an ambulatory fashion," Jade said.

"You tried to make me run away in the middle of the night!" Connie snapped.

"Even if I did, could you blame me?" Jade retorted. "You ate me!"

"Oh, for the love of…I did not eat you!" Connie stalked over to her full-length mirror on the closet door. She grasped at the collar of her shirt and tugged it down, revealing the gemstone seated beneath her neck. It felt odd to be giving her reflection an I-Told-You-So look, but she was too angry to care.

"Is that…me? How did… What did you…?" The vitriol in Jade's thoughts evaporated. Her ephemeral voice shrank, wobbling as if on the verge of tears. "I'm not just inside of you. I…I am you!" she cried.

It was hard for Connie to stay angry as she heard the tremor of genuine fear in Jade's words. Sighing, she released her shirt collar and said, "It's a long story."

A knock at her bedroom door startled Connie. She whirled at her mother's voice, which filtered through the closed door. "Connie? Are you on the phone? Who are you talking to?"

"It's nothing, Mom," Connie called back. Then, thinking twice, she added, "It's this funny playlist on TubeTube. This one guy takes bottled soda and breath mints, and he—"

There was no faster way to guarantee her mother's disinterest than to mention some byproduct of the internet media generation. "You have school today, Connie. Get dressed and come downstairs for your breakfast."

Connie held her breath and listened until she heard her mother's footsteps on the stairs. Then she sighed and began digging through her dresser for an outfit to wear to school. Her choices had become limited to shirts with a high enough collar and thick enough material to hide her passenger. As the weather grew warmer, her wardrobe options would become exceedingly sparse. "Breakfast," she said wistfully. "Hey, now that we're talking, we need to figure out what to do about food."

"Ugh," Jade replied, regaining some of her former superiority. "Yes, you humans require constant sustenance and respiration to maintain your physical form. I can abide by the latter, but the former is nigh-unbearable. All of that wet, sloppy, disgusting bio-matter sliding inside, churning and breaking apart and reforming into…urghhh. Fortunately, I have found a nearly acceptable alternative. Look next to your primitive communication hub."

It took Connie a few extra seconds to discern Jade's meaning, and then she went to her desk and picked up a wrapper next to her laptop. "You mean this? This is just from my meal bar last night."

"Exactly. I had feared that our shared 'issue' might become an extended one—a fear which I now find was fully justified—and so when I discovered the discarded nutrient container, I researched its properties on the communication device while I still possessed control of our form's locomotion. This ¡Soy Delicioso! product meets all the caloric and dietary needs of the average human, and is engineered to produce as little byproduct as possible. Given the circumstances, I find it efficient and, based on its olfactory remnants, satisfactorily tasteless."

Connie scowled and threw the wrapper aside. "That isn't fair! It's my body, which makes it my stomach!"

"Human," Jade said warningly, "I already have a front-row seat to the stadium of horror that is your biology. Everything inside of you is constantly sloshing, pumping, oozing, emptying, and refilling. I have already come to terms with the fact that there is no immediate way to circumvent the necessity of your bodily functions. But if I have to endure the loathsome process of your consuming organic matter only to expel it again, I want it to be as preprocessed and removed from its origins as possible, and these bars meet that criteria while ensuring that you will not starve."

Longingly, Connie pictured the toast with orange marmalade purchased fresh from the farmer's market, and the tart raspberries and sweet blueberries, all of which would be waiting downstairs on a plate for Connie to stuff into a garbage bag. "But I'm so hungry," she pleaded. "Can't we compromise?"

Even as she imagined the food, she felt a separate wave of nausea rise up at the back of her throat. "This is a compromise, believe me," Jade grumbled. Then, before Connie could debate, she said, "That voice on the other side of the hatch. That was your commander?"

The title gave Connie pause, as it wasn't entirely inaccurate. "That's my mother," she said.

"Aha, a matriarch. Splendid. Request permission to use your pack's means of transit, and you can take us to the nearest Gem outpost. Does your species still domesticate beasts of burden to use for transport?"

Struggling into a high-collared shirt, Connie said, "I can't drive myself anywhere!"

"Well, then request an escort," Jade replied testily. "Do not bog this issue down in semantics, human. We need to extricate me from this form immediately!"

"I mean," Connie said, fumbling with the shirt's buttons, "I can't just go off and do whatever you want on a whim. I have to go to school."

"School? A learning facility? Unacceptable," Jade insisted. "I have no time to waste on your remedial education. You can regurgitate human trivia once we have found a solution to our integration."

"Tough. I already have experts working hard on a way to get you out of me at the local…er, 'Gem outpost.' In the meantime, my Mom isn't going to let me skip school. We'll go visit the Gems right after school, I promise." If what she suspected about Jade was true, it would make their trip to meet the Crystal Gems potentially tricky. It would be better to leave the details vague until they actually reached the beach house, where she could explain the situation with help and, if things went especially poorly, backup.

"You have already contacted a local outpost regarding our issue? Splendid!" Jade said. The thought came with the first glimmers of happiness and hope Connie had felt from the Gem since waking in her chair. "But if you simply explain to your matriarch the nature of the emergency, I am certain she will allow you to—"

"No!" Connie exclaimed, breaking into a sweat at the mere thought of explaining the gemstone to her parents, much less at ditching school to go to Beach City. "No, we have to keep you a secret. If my Mom found out about you, she would drag me to the hospital and never let me leave until they had yanked you out of me. Then we'd never make it to the Gems for help, ever."

"A human medical facility? Perish the thought. The last thing I need is one of your shamans scratching at my gem with their blunted bronze knives." Connie didn't know whether to be relieved or offended by the disgust behind Jade's thoughts. "Very well. We can maintain your subterfuge until we reach your 'school,' but then I insist we leave for the outpost immediately after."

"We will. Immediately 'after' school is over," Connie retorted.

Wordless exasperation resonated in Connie's thoughts. She imagined the bodiless Gem storming from one side of her skull to the other in a tantrum. "Of all the creatures to be embedded into, I became stuck inside a stubborn anthropoid with delusions of civilization. This would have been so much simpler if you had just kept walking—"

The tirade ended in a mental choke. A wave of complicated feelings followed before they, too, were squelched.

Connie's gaze drifted back to the mirror. She looked herself—her selves—in the eye, her brows crashing together in a deep frown. Dark suspicions intermingled with a rising nervousness she knew was not her own. "What happened in that dream? What were you trying to make me do?" she said.

An uncomfortable silence passed. When Connie refused to break her own gaze, Jade's thoughts surfaced reluctantly. "Gems are a much more advanced species than biologicals. We have more direct control over ourselves and our functions, even those whose organic equivalents would normally be autonomous."

"You can shape and control the light that makes up your bodies. I know all that," Connie said, unimpressed.

"That control extends to our minds as well, to a degree." Moments ago, Jade had sounded acerbically, unswervingly smug. Now she seemed hesitant. "The occasion does not arise often, but in the event that a Gem's physical body needs to be reutilized—for lack of resources, or to correct a defect—that Gem can choose to…relinquish her material self."

It took Connie a second to piece together Jade's admission with something Steven had confided in her long ago, when she had first asked him about his parents. "You're talking about giving up your physical form," she realized aloud. "But in the dream, you wanted me to…"

"Er, yes," Jade thought. "I surmised that, if we were linked in such a way as to merge our psyches, that you might also have the ability to give up your… Well, you did not. And here we are. It is best to focus on the here and now, yes? We should determine the fastest means of conveyance—"

"What would have happened to me?" Connie demanded, "if I had kept walking?"

Deeper, longer silence passed, and Connie refused to look away from the mirror. At last, Jade answered, "Your physical body would likely have remained unperturbed, its functions continuing unabated. But those functions you associate with your conscious self, your thoughts and memories…would have…"

Connie's face grew slacken. "You were trying to get rid of me. You were trying to…delete me, or erase me!" she hissed.

"Human, you misapprehend my intentions. Your primitive understanding of—"

Whirling toward the door, Connie furrowed her brow, concentrating her thoughts into sub-vocalized white noise. Jade's voice in her head dissolved into a pained squawk as Connie kept her wordless fury circling, chasing itself in an unbroken stream that drowned out any other silent words the Gem tried to form.

Connie didn't expect gratitude. She knew Jade hadn't chosen their fate any more than she had. But for all the fear she had weathered, the anxiety and the hunger pangs she endured, she thought the Gem could at least not be completely horrible to her in return. And to find out that Jade had thought to dispose of Connie as their first moment of real connection was too much to forgive.

"Connie," her mother's distant voice drifted from the bottom of the stairs, "I won't call you again. Let's go, or you're going to be late."

The badgering sparked fresh annoyance in Connie, which she turned inward as a stream of wordless, biting thoughts toward the green passenger in her chest. In a strange way, she was grateful to the Gem. For all the frustration she had felt since becoming stuck to Jade, she now had a valid target for it. She had imagined Jade's awakening a hundred times since her visit to the barn. In some of them, she had comforted a heartsick, frightened new friend. In others, she had tried to calm the rage of a righteous and rightfully fearful passenger. Others still had Connie commiserating with a fellow prisoner.

But she had never imagined herself at the mercy of a petty, spiteful, self-important jerk who would try to trick her into an unspeakable act.

Throwing her bedroom door open, Connie marched out to collect her breakfast so she could sneak back upstairs to make it garbage. Her fists hung white-knuckled at her side, and her mouth drew into a tight, miserable line.

Somewhere, beneath the anger and gloom, one darkly humorous thought bubbled to the surface despite Connie's best efforts to quash it: she and her passenger still shared at least one thing in common, because they both could not wait to be rid of each other.