Driving for real wasn't really like playing a game.

Watching a pixellated vehicle move along a screen was only a very crude illusion of movement – now that Centi was behind the wheel of a real car, there could be no denying that the metal contraption she was in was truly rushing ahead, that the scenery around her was solid and tangible. The vibrations of the engine rattled through her hypersensitive nerves; the steering wheel pulled and bucked against her hands like something alive. It was a much rougher ride than she was used to.

But all the same, she didn't panic. The sensation of speed didn't terrify her. Because even if a spaceship was much smoother, it also went much faster, and had infinitely more complicated controls. The human-ship only went forward, backward, left, and right. Compared to the machines she was used to driving, it might as well have just been a video game.

She recognized the road with painted lines from Road Killer, and her hands squeezed the steering wheel to keep it within the designated lane, even as her foot pressed unrelentingly on the gas pedal. That was another thing she didn't do very often, having to stay inside a narrow area, because space was usually so vast and open; but all Homeworld pilots had to do precision training to learn proper navigation of asteroid belts or crowded ports. This wasn't much different.

Her eye darted to the side for a microsecond. Steven was in the seat next to her, his fingertips nervously digging into the cushion, while Amethyst whooped and pumped her fists in the backseat.

"Tell me where I'm going!" yelled Centi, doing her very best not to let the tantalizing blur of Beach City distract her.

Steven swallowed hard. "Uhm…keep going straight until…" Suddenly, his eyes blew open wide. "Red light!"

"Red light?" she echoed with a frown.

"It means stop!"

Centi switched her foot to the brake pedal and stomped down. As they screeched to a halt, Amethyst scowled incredulously and leaned over the front seats.

"What, are you trying to give the Rubies a chance to catch up to us?!" she yelled. "There are no red lights in a car chase!"

"But it's the rules!" spluttered Steven. "Red for stop, green for go, and yellow for 'if you step on the gas now, they can't give you a ticket'! That's what my dad taught me…!"

For all that Centi understood, they may as well have been arguing in a foreign language. She squeezed the steering wheel impatiently. "Make up your mind, do I stop or go?!"

"Go!" bellowed Amethyst. "No cars are coming anyway!"

She went.

A couple of blocks away, more cars appeared, mainly driving on the other side of the road. They gave the erratically speeding car astonished looks, like they'd never seen a getaway driver before, but Centi didn't care; she had much more pressing matters to worry about. "Which way?!"

"Turn left up ahead!" cried Steven.

As she jerked the steering wheel in the indicated direction, he reached over and hesitantly tapped a small lever sticking out from the dashboard, which made a clicking noise until she'd completed the turn.

Amethyst groaned loudly. "Did you just put on the turn signal?!"

"You have to signal your turns!" he protested. "It's the law!"

"This is a car chase!"

"But we've already left the Rubies way behind!"

Centi suddenly realized that the road she was on didn't go much further; she'd either have to turn again or end up driving on the sand. "Which way now?!"

"Right!" yelled Steven and Amethyst in unison.

She yanked the steering wheel, and both of them went tumbling against the opposite side of the car.

Steven clung to his seatbelt nervously. "Uh, you can probably start going a little slower now…"

Centi obliged, lessening the weight of her foot on the gas pedal. Now she could see that the road they were on went straight around the outskirts of Beach City, eventually leading up to the temple, where they could report to Garnet and Pearl what had happened to them. In the moment of relative calm, she looked at the various dials and arrows lit up behind her steering wheel, but they were all inscribed with human lettering that rendered them meaningless to her.

In the back, Amethyst righted herself and leaned over to get a better look out the front window. "Not bad for your first time driving a car, C," she commented.

"Maybe we should teach you about traffic rules before next time," muttered Steven. "Especially since it probably won't be a car chase…"

A few minutes later, they reached the city limits, where they abandoned the human-ship. They left the keys inside for whenever its owner managed to find it again. "At least you didn't break anything!" declared Amethyst cheerfully. "We may have stolen a car, but it could have gone a lot worse!"

Centi shrugged. In the Homeworld army, pilots had constantly borrowed one another's ships in emergency situations, and surely humans were also capable of understanding that she'd had to use whatever resources were available to her in her time of necessity.

After quickly glancing around to ensure that there was no sign of the Rubies, the three of them hurried up the cliff side, silhouetted against the setting sun.

…

"You were chased?!" cried Pearl, her hands fluttering with horror as they came to rest on either side of her face. She kept repeating things as if demanding clarification, even though, by Centi's count, this was their third time going through the entire story. "The Rubies found you?!"

Amethyst groaned impatiently. "But we got away!"

"I just…don't understand how this is possible!" Pearl bounded over to Garnet, still squeezing her own cheeks fearfully. "Did you know that this would happen?!"

Garnet shrugged stiffly. "I saw that it was a possibility," she conceded. "But things going wrong is always a possibility. It didn't seem likely that Homeworld would be wandering around Beach City looking for us."

"But they were! And they saw Steven, and…!"

Garnet's hand descended to rest firmly on Pearl's shoulder. "They did what they were supposed to do," she stated. "They didn't risk getting caught out by the Homeworld superiors. They came straight here and told us about it, thanks to Centi's help."

A familiar prickle of self-consciousness darted across Centi's skin. And yet…she understood that, this time, she had done something important. She could be as self-deprecating as she liked, but there was no denying it.

Abruptly, Garnet turned for the warp pad. "Come on. We need to put more distance between us and the Rubies. Let's go to the barn."

"Garnet!" groaned Amethyst dramatically. "Come on! Is running from these guys all we're ever gonna do?!"

Garnet fixed the small quartz with the flat, steely gaze of her visor. "No. But remember what Centi saw yesterday. Until we know what we're up against, the best thing to do is to watch from afar. Besides, Peridot and Lapis need to know about what happened."

"Fiiiiiiine…" Amethyst flopped over to the pad, followed a moment later by Pearl, Steven, and finally Centi.

In the moments before they teleported, Centi leaned over and whispered to Steven, "What is a 'barn'?"

"It's a kind of Earth building," he answered. "Normally animals live there, but Peridot and Lapis live in this one."

And before she could ask any further questions, such as what a 'barn' looked like, or why Peridot and Amethyst had been relegated to living in a building reserved for the storage of nonsentient Earth creatures, the transporting light of the warp pad had plucked them up and deposited them far away from the temple.

Or at least, Centi assumed that this place was far away, as it didn't look anything like Beach City. She inhaled, both seeing and smelling the presence of trees, grass, and other vegetation – but it wasn't really like the jungle around her ship, either. Those plants were twisting, choking growths that consumed any space they could find and could even tear down Homeworld tech with nothing but roots and vines, while these were softer, slighter, leaving room for the ground and the sky to breathe and show their colors. As she stepped forward, following the Crystal Gems on their journey to the barn, the grass felt strangely fresh and springy beneath the soles of her jumpsuit.

In due time, a building appeared in front of them. Centi didn't know very much about human architecture, but so far, the structures she'd seen on Earth had been simple, boxy things, crude and childish in their construction. But this building looked like it had started out with the same basic structure, then sprouted several other, smaller buildings from its various walls and corners. Also, some of the additional buildings were made of a clear shiny substance, and somebody appeared to have flown a human-ship and gotten it stuck just above the door.

She scurried ahead to catch up with Steven. "This is the barn that you spoke of…?"

"Yeah," he confirmed. "Pretty cool, right?"

"It has a very intriguing appearance," she replied, tilting her head slightly as her eye scanned the various details of the structure.

"If you think so now, just wait until you see the inside."

The door swung open with the grating moan of worn-out hinges, causing Centi to jolt. Peridot peered out at them from the dimly lit interior. "Visitors!" she declared. "I wasn't expecting you to come here today, Steven – oh, and you even brought Centi with you! Let me guess, you just couldn't wait to see my astonishing meep morp gallery?"

Centi stared at a point in the distance, one hand starting to twist in her hair. "I'd love to see your, um, meep morps, Peridot. But…"

"The Rubies have shown up again," interrupted Garnet shortly.

Peridot's eyes widened. "Excuse me?!"

Amethyst took the cue to explain. "Me, Steven, and Centi were just chillin' in Beach City, mindin' our own business, and bam! There they were. We stole somebody's car and drove away!"

"Ahem!" Pearl cleared her throat pointedly. "They borrowed someone's car, because there was no other way to escape. For all we know, the Rubies' commander could have been right behind them!"

Something twinged in the back of Centi's mind. Some kind of memory or bit of knowledge or something, long dormant but briefly stirred out of its sleep by Pearl's words…she tried to prod at it and bring it back to light, but it evaded her grasp, and she let it go without much of a fight. This happened to her intermittently since her corruption. Probably it was nothing important.

Peridot shoved the door opened and beckoned them inside emphatically. "Come on in and tell me everything! Lapis – hey, Lazuli! Come down here, Steven and the other gems have some important stuff to tell us!"

The inside of the barn was so crowded with junk that they were all forced to walk in single file towards the back. Centi looked around, unable to keep herself from gaping at the vast assortment of items on display. Everything from food labels to busted-up machinery to household items altered almost beyond recognition had been gathered here, assembled into new configurations, and arranged in a haphazard gallery of sorts. There were unfamiliar implements hanging from racks on the walls and columns of garbage cans turning the floor into a slalom course. And at the very back of the barn were several dismembered toilets, where Lapis met them, and where Peridot sat down to hear the story of their high-speed escape from the Rubies.

Centi was so distracted by her surroundings that she tuned out the vast majority of it, only coming back to herself several minutes later, when Peridot's voice cut in pointedly: "So they were just wandering around looking for you? Something about that doesn't seem right…"

"Why not?" demanded Amethyst. "Those other Rubies did the same thing before, remember? When they were looking for – "

"But that's not the proper Homeworld method of searching!" interjected Peridot. "As a former agent of Homeworld, I can confidently state that anyone sent to Earth on a recovery mission would be supplemented with the proper amount of tracking technology, even Rubies. Especially Rubies, in fact, since they're too stupid to succeed without the assistance of gem tech!"

Centi blinked, her eye refocusing. "Actually…they did have some kind of technology," she realized aloud. "I remember that one of them had a handheld device, just a little thing. I don't know what it was, though."

Peridot narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. "Could you describe it?"

"Um…kind of square, and it had a little screen, and…" Her hands coiled uselessly in the air, and she made a few vague sounds. She had a fairly clear image of the device in her mind's eye, but it was proving very difficult to translate into words.

Fortunately, Steven came to her rescue. "I bet she could draw it!" he exclaimed. "Do you guys have any paper and pencils lying around?"

Lapis darted off to one side of the barn and returned with an old plastic pen and a small pad of lined paper. Centi accepted both items gratefully, uncapped the pen, and started to sketch carefully. The sleek, rounded rectangular shape of the device, an antenna fixed to the top of it, some small symbols to suggest an interface… "I didn't get to see every part of it," she admitted. "But this is what I remember."

Peridot's fingers scuttled forward and spun the drawing to face her. She pressed her lips together. "This resembles a low-grade signal tracker," she announced.

"But what signal would they have been tracking?" asked Pearl with a frown, crouching down to get a better look.

"Well, for a tracker of this caliber…there are only a few frequencies that it can detect, and most of those would be used to broadcast the location of valuables, such as weapons and ships." Peridot ran her fingertip along the edge of the paper. "All of which are equipped with beacons so that they can be recovered if they are ever misplaced."

"Maybe they're looking for that ship we got a few months ago?" guessed Steven.

She shook her head. "No. It's not practical to equip every ship with a beacon, and that pod you acquired from the other rubies certainly isn't advanced enough to warrant such measures! But…there is one other option that makes sense. Sometimes, high-ranking gems carry a beacon in their uniform if they know they're going into a dangerous situation or uncharted territory, as a way to ensure that Homeworld can find them if they're in trouble. It allows them to broadcast their location for pickup." She made a derisive little sound. "Not for a worker like me, of course, but maybe some members of the upper and lower court – including warriors…"

"In other words, Jasper," said Lapis softly.

Throughout the conversation, Garnet's usually unflappable face had been growing…not alarmed, exactly, but tense and grim. She appeared to be having a deep inner conversation with herself, and only now did she finally break out of it to speak aloud. "No," she said. "Jasper is bubbled. The Rubies were tracking a signal that led them into town."

"Who, then?" demanded Peridot. "The only ones in town were Steven and Amethyst, who have never been affiliated with Homeworld, and – !" She cut herself off with a soft squeak. "Oh…oh my stars…!"

Centi took a step backward as understanding struck her. Ice seemed to squirm in her stomach. There was a certain amount of logic in the words that she knew were common, and yet it still wasn't enough to make her fully accept them. "I-I was in town, too," she stammered. "But I'd never…!"

"Hush." Garnet held a finger up to her lips. "You haven't done anything wrong. But Peridot is right. Homeworld put beacons in the uniforms of high-ranking gems who were traveling, such as aristocrats, warriors…and captains."

And then she snapped her head away, straining to listen for the sound of the Rubies arriving in the countryside, almost certain to become a reality at any minute now that Centi had led them straight here.