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.