Chorus
Chapter Two
Note: Updates to this and other fics I'm writing will be sporadic, as mentioned earlier my health is in a weird place and it's hard to get wifi in hospitals. Hopefully I'll be back to spamming chapters very soon. In the meantime, and as is now ritual, I recommend you check out my novel if you like my work, and that way you have something to read if I end up in the ICU for a bit.
US link: dp/B07BGSPPBY
UK link: . /dp/B07BGSPPBY
And now, paperback!: dp/1981067620
…..
Prelude
Steven agonized over telling Garnet and Amethyst where he was going, but in the end they made the decision for him. He went home to pack some supplies and they weren't there, still on the last mission they'd taken. Aware that the clock was against him and this mysterious yellow gem probably wouldn't wait around, he threw some food and a change of clothes into his backpack. He briefly considered calling Connie, but given what Ruby and Pearl had told him about who they were getting involved with he decided against it. If things went badly wrong at least he'd be the only one in the firing line.
Nobody knows much about her, Ruby had said. She remodels pearls, it's illegal but pretty much everyone does it. She's the best on the planet but she only takes on some jobs.
Remodels pearls how? Steven had asked, with an innocence he would never see again.
She tampers with their manifested forms, or their gems, Pearl answered, trembling behind Ruby near the console. To change their appearance.
Oh, so it's like...plastic surgery, kind of? he laughed awkwardly.
I don't know what that is, Ruby shrugged. It happens because the pearls' owner doesn't like how they look and a colour wash and new apparel won't make the change they want. Or they want the pearl to stop doing something it can't help doing.
Did she remodel you? Steven asked Pearl, hoping to quell that sick feeling growing in his stomach.
Yes, she answered. Twice. The third time a different gem did it.
What did she do to you? Lars piped up from the captain's chair. Steven hadn't realized he'd been listening.
My owner thought my eyes were too close together, Pearl mumbled, and she declined to say any more.
Talking about remodeling clearly stressed her out, and Ruby had expressed anger towards the whole idea (obviously because it distressed Pearl so much) so why were they putting their trust in this yellow gem? Steven asked himself over and over as he climbed into the shuttle and detached from the ship.
The Rutiles had programmed the shuttle to slip through a gap in Homeworld's security gates, and he was due to land in a section of the main city that housed acres of factories. After that, he was on his own before he could be picked up by the yellow gem. It was nerve-shredding.
He managed to slip through, and the smog of the factories covered his landing nicely. So far, so much easier than he imagined. Sitting on the roof of the factory, he heard gems underneath him talking as they worked. They used a lot of words he didn't understand, but otherwise their speech patterns were human-like.
"Quartz?"
He jumped, nearly shouted. For such a large creature, the yellow gem was remarkably quiet.
"Wanna get those nerves under control, pebble," she quipped. "Don't want to attract too much attention."
"Right," he mumbled. "Sorry. I'm Steven, thanks so much for..."
"You look different to other quartzes," she cut across him. "I dig it, but it's a bit too conspicuous. Can you fix that?"
"Uh, well, I'm not really good at shifting yet..."
"Well, we have to get across the city on foot, we need to do something," she said, stroking her chin thoughtfully. "Hang on..."
She took two small objects from the pocket of her ripped-up leggings. One of them, a small sheet of metallic-looking paper, she handed to him. The other, a small round gem, she tapped lightly and spoke to.
"We need you out here," she drawled.
The gem glowed and a moment later a pearl, red-haired and dressed in a dark blue tunic but otherwise identical to Pearl, stood blinking impassively beside them.
"This quartz," the yellow gem began, gesturing to Steven in a casual, slightly disparaging way, "needs to look less ready-to-be-arrested-and-tossed-in-isopod. Can you do anything?"
"Of course," the pearl answered.
Her gem whirred and shot out a beam of light that traced Steven's body. It tickled, but he tried hard not to squirm.
"Those are nanobytes," she told him. "Try not to make any unnecessary movements, it should cover you until we get to the workshop."
It was kind of creepy how she sounded so much like Pearl but a hundred times quieter and with none of the liveliness. Like Pearl if she'd been stripped of a personality.
That's unfair, Steven scolded himself internally. You just met her, maybe she's just shy.
The two gems turned on their heels in perfect sync and started walking off. Steven grabbed his backpack and tried to keep up.
…..
The trip to the yellow gem's workshop took them right through the city, onto one of the public transport vehicles and through six different checkpoints. Steven and the yellow gem passed quickly enough, but they scanned the pearl carefully, even prying open her mouth to check her throat. They had a specific tool for that job, and Steven couldn't watch them use it on her.
Gems of all kinds milled around the city's immaculate streets. He saw a huge number of Amethysts patrolling, groups of Jasper mucking around in alleys, a crowd of Rubies huddled around a shopfront, a number of upper-class-looking gems on the train-type thing they got on. This was where he saw some other pearls, nowehere else.
Steven had known, if not dwelled on, pearls' status as more or less slaves on Homeworld, but the train ride really cemented it in his horrified mind. The few that he saw varied in style and colour but were otherwise the same, their faces were blank and their eyes downcast and they didn't speak unless they were spoken to.
The yellow gem had spent the ride watching the pearls, jotting down notes in a little tablet-type thing she had. Occasionally she leaned over to whisper to her pearl. They both pretty much ignored Steven. By the time they reached the workshop Steven had seen so much he felt dizzy.
"Okay, let's talk plan," the yellow gem said with one foot in the workshop, tossing a wheeled chair in Steven's general direction. "What do you want and what do you want me to do about it?"
"Well, uh..." Steven mumbled, gulping. "Shouldn't we introduce ourselves first?"
The yellow gem snorted, but it was good-natured.
"Manners don't count for much in this business," she said. "But okay, I'll bite. I'm Orthoclase."
"Oh, I thought..."
"Yeah, I get that a lot. Unfortunately," she muttered, rolling her eyes.
"Sorry," Steven sputtered. It wouldn't do to annoy this gem, even if she wasn't a diamond. "I'm Steven. Steven Quartz Universe."
"Are you a new kind of quartz? I've never heard that designation before," Orthoclase asked, fingers poised over her tablet-thing.
"Actually, I'm half gem," he explained. "My mother was a quartz..."
He stopped himself, remembering that that wasn't true. But he couldn't just tell these stranger gems that, could he?
"What's a mother?" Orthoclase asked.
"Uh...it's like a gem you grow inside," Steven tried to explain. "You know, like you guys grow from the ground? It's like that except I grew from another gem and sort of took over her form..."
By the look on Orthoclase's face, this explanation was a really bad one. The pearl, however, looked unruffled.
"So you're a parasite," she offered. "That's unusual."
"I'll say," Orthoclase snorted, shaking her head. "At least you're probably not a zoatox, right?"
"I don't know what that is," Steven admitted.
"Then you probably aren't. Great. Parasitic gems, what next? And you're looking for a pearl..."
"Specifically, she's looking for the renegade pearl that fought in the rebellion with Rose Quartz," the pearl said.
Orthoclase gaped, and quickly recovered.
"That's why you wanted us to take this job, isn't it?" she said, flicking the pearl's forehead playfully. "Holy Core...what makes you think that pearl is here?"
"She went missing a week ago..." Steven began. "Another pearl tracked down where she was taken from, she said there was nano-something and a macrowarp..."
"Microwarp," the pearl corrected. "And nanobytes, she left memory behind. She had a nanotracer installed."
Orthoclase whistled.
"This just gets better and better," she laughed. "There hasn't been a pearl with a nanotracer on Homeworld in 800 orbits. I've never even seen one!"
"I know it's a big thing to ask," Steven said, already feeling like they were going to send him away. "But we need her back. Please."
"Are you kidding?" Orthoclase scoffed. "This has got to be the riskiest, most impossible job ever. Of course I'm going to do it!"
A hint of a smile began on the pearls' face. The relief hit Steven like a punch to the stomach. Tears gathered behind his eyes.
"Thank you," he sobbed, wiping at his eyes furiously.
"Don't thank me yet," Orthoclase said, patting his head. "I don't know how or where to start looking..."
"I've worked out a plan," the pearl piped up.
"Of course you have," Orthoclase drawled, spinning on her chair and throwing her feet up on the pearl's lap. "Do you want to share it or is it one of those things you keep to yourself?"
Apparently not being able to talk about things was a pearl-wide trait.
"There's really only one way to go about this," the pearl began, folding her hands neatly over Orthoclase's feet. "If she's on Homeworld or near enough, we can get a signal to her."
"Not if she's impounded," Orthoclase interrupted.
"No, not a comm signal," the pearl continued. "Pearls can communicate over distances without being detected."
Orthoclase's posture shifted dramatically. She took her feet off of the pearl's lap, leaned forward, suddenly intensely focused.
"Since when?" she probed, sounding stern but not angry. "I knew you had some way of talking but I assumed it was that hand-thing you keep doing..."
"That is also how we communicate," the pearl said. "But when the restrictions were placed on us, gesture-speak was rendered ineffective. We developed something else to take its place."
Orthoclase laughed, and clapped Steven on the back hard enough to almost knock him out of his seat.
"Nearly eighteen orbits of asking and watching and waiting and then you come along and she spills all her secrets," she chuckled. "I owe you, pebble."
Steven searched the pearl's face for signs that she was upset, but she was as solemn and still as a marble statue.
"We call it song-weaving," the pearl explained, to Orthoclase's growing amazement. "We learned to knit sound waves together and we share memory through them. Mostly our songs are at a frequency and volume too low for other gems to hear, but pearls can tell if there is one in the air. They can absorb it, pass it on or add to it."
"Have you been doing that here all this time?" Orthoclase asked incredulously.
"Of course," the pearl responded.
"How is that going to help Pearl?" Steven asked. "I think you didn't start doing that until after she left for Earth... that's when the restrictions were made, right?"
The pearl on Lars' ship had told him a lot about the restrictions. More than he wanted to know.
"Even if she can't pick up the art for herself, she can hear it and if it's still connected to the pearl that sent it that pearl will know where she is."
The pearl's gem whirred and lit up the room. An image of long interconnected silver threads floated in front of them. On each thread was a small dot.
"With a song that is connected at several points, for instance woven by five pearls, it can expand and reach outwards at a considerable distance. It could reach up to twenty pearls, who could then pass it on and strengthen it.
"Huh. This is going to be easier than I thought," Orthoclase said.
"I'm afraid not," the pearl told her. "In order to cover the entirety of Homeworld, we would need a concentrated effort from at least five hundred individual pearls, all singing the same song. We would also have to compose a song that can support that many voices. And we would have to do it undetected."
Orthoclase whistled low, and Steven's heart sank. It sounded impossible. He had seen less than a dozen pearls on Homeworld, how were they going to get five hundred?
"We don't need to find five hundred pearls," the pearl said, as if he'd said that out loud. "We need around fifty to create the structure. If it travels far enough, other pearls will strengthen it as it goes."
"That's a pretty big if," Orthoclase mused.
"We also need to find a safe isolated place to create it."
"That I can probably do," Orthoclase said, rising to her feet. "I know just the gem. But this whole operation sounds like it's going to get dangerous, so we need something fighting in our corner."
She walked off, dialing a number on her tablet-thing.
"Hey, Hematite! It's me...I need to talk to you about your pearl...no, I told you she's not infected but I think I should take a look at her core circuit..."
Steven and the pearl sat in silence, watching Orthoclase negotiate with this Hematite.
"Um..." he began, awkwardly. "So...does Orthoclase just call you Pearl or..."
"Yes," the pearl answered blandly.
"Doesn't that get confusing when there's other pearls here?"
"No."
"Oh, okay."
"You may address me as something else if you wish."
Steven's mind short-circuited trying to think of a good name, but he kept flashing back to memories of the preschool he'd gone to that was ruled by a little girl with an iron fist whose given name was Annabelle but everyone referred to as...
"Ginger," he blurted out.
"Very well," the pearl said agreeably.
