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.