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“Oh, you look so beautiful!” Pearl exclaims from the corner of the room, hands clasped to her chest and beaming like a searchlight.
Rose laughs. “You always say that.”
“It’s always true,” she replies. “Especially tonight. If only you didn’t have to wear those veils—all the gems out in the city tonight don’t even know how much they’re missing. But it’s for the best, I suppose. I know you wouldn’t want anyone to be envious.”
Rose shrugs and sighs. “It might be a nice change,” she replies, “from no one daring to be.”
She is dressed in a carefully formulated strategy; the highest of “low” fashion, an imitation of styles borrowed from scholar and soldier gems in the nightspots of the capital city. That’s where she’s headed tonight, heavily disguised—it’s what she does these days, when she’s trying to relax, or have fun, or whatever you wanted to call it (in her own mind she usually calls it ‘filling time’, but that’s awfully depressing). “I feel like no one really thinks anything about me. The whole empire knows my name but they have no idea who I actually am. That’s why I go there, really. I wish I could reach out and really be together with all of them, not this wall there. The common gems…are connected.” She turns, and Pearl has that look in her eyes—that too familiar look, conditioned deference fighting an opinionated nature, a dedication to fact. The look that always tells Rose she may be a bit mistaken, so that Pearl doesn’t have to. “What is it, my dear?”
She blushes at the affectionate terms, both because affection is not really something a gem like Rose is supposed to have for her and because, in the span of a decade, she still hasn’t gotten used to being addressed with anything other than barked epithets preceding marching orders. And she’s wringing her hands as if they’re burning. But she says, with a degree of conviction that seems to startle even her, “They’re connected in some ways. They’re divided in others. They have to compete with each other, you know, for whatever position in whatever they’re made for, and–and there’s always a few that don’t make that cut, defectives and noncompliants and–I think that–they’re probably lonely too.”
Rose smiles, bemused and pleased at this complication of her opinion, and replies, “Who said I was lonely?”
Transparent panic shoots through Pearl’s face. “Oh–I didn’t mean to–assume anything–”
“No, it’s alright. I guess that…sometimes I am.”
Silence falls. Pearl hovers behind her with one foot forward, debating whether to move closer, the mantra of her days–please, Rose, is there anything I can do–poised on her lips. Rose turns before she can say it. “It’s honestly not as bad, now that you’re around. You’re just the kind of company I want, out here away from it all. It just gets a little too quiet sometimes. In the city nobody knows me, but everyone’s there. I can listen to them and know that they’re all living their lives and…that comforts me. Does that make sense?”
“I…suppose,” she replies. “If it makes you feel any better, though, you know, they do still do that when you’re not watching.”
Rose’s soft smile grows wider, more real. “Of course they do.” Even in her idolatrous devotion, Pearl’s real commander, she thinks, is logic, and it’s a shame that both Pearl herself and the gems that created her think of this as an irreparable flaw, because it keeps Rose’s head remarkably clear amidst the noise of political pseudo-godhood.
“I suppose you could always take someone along who already knows you. I know there are other gems who do. Your advisors at the capitol or—”
“I wish I could take you,” Rose says suddenly.
“You—what?”
“I wish I could take you with me, into the city. I bet you’d love it—the music, and all the beautiful buildings and clothes and—you’d just make it fun again, that’s all. I’d rather be with you than any of the gems from the capitol or any place like that…” She trails off, and her gaze travels forward to meet Pearl’s ever-widening eyes.
“I mean,” she says, softly, straining to keep her voice devoid of feeling one way or the other, “Of course I can come if you want me to.”
The “of course” is too emphatic. As hard as she tries, she can never match the perfect neutrality that the other pearls speak to their superiors with. She wants to go. Or perhaps more accurately, it is important to her that Rose knows she has the option to invite her.
“Hmm. It isn’t really the sort of place you bring a pearl to,” she says, and she can actually see Pearl stop herself from looking disappointed. The flicker of an expression invites a stab of sympathy. Here is an open book, and she’s mostly only known gems that want her emphatically shut. “But maybe, with a bit of doing…yes, I think you could.”
“Could what?”
“Come with me, just as my friend.”
Pearl’s ever-changing face freezes, wide-eyed and drained of luster, and her hand flutters to the side of her head. But then her disbelief slowly melts to delight. Her fingers clench with the intensity of her yearning. “Do you…do you mean that?”
Rose takes Pearl’s hand, drawing her arm from her side and far upward, nearly over her head. Even after several years, her projected body is hazy, its surface slightly guttering after centuries of terror. She’s looked better with every passing month, but Rose still keeps her here, mostly, at her secluded country house, protected from the disdaining stares that she’s seen following defective gems like parasites during her curiosity-fueled excursions to the less reputable sections of the planet. Earlier on, when they’d only just met, Rose convinced herself that she—Rose Diamond, the healer, the nurturer of all the wounded—had created a perfect sanctuary for this poor frightened gem she’d found and saved. She convinced herself that the only world Pearl knew outside the factory was one where she would never be treated like a machine, one where she was free to speak and be heard, and that she would never desire much beyond that.
But Rose is smarter than that. And much more pertinently, Pearl is smarter than that. She knows there’s more to the universe than this isolated estate, and she knows that it is harsh, but also dazzling. Before that “of course,” it had never occurred to Rose that her protective measures, to a certain degree, tread on Pearl’s pride. Or whatever the equivalent of pride is, for a pearl. Sense of duty, maybe.
Rose looks up to see Pearl staring down at their clasped hands with cautious joy, searching diligently for the catch in this situation, chin lifted and eyes brilliantly alert.
It’s pride. She has pride. Rose understands, better than ever, what it is about her that she so longs for every moment she’s not by her side.
“Please,” she says, “come with me.”
Pearl meets her gaze. She doesn’t bow, she doesn’t salute, she doesn’t murmur the traditional scrap of poetry that indicates a received request. Rose said “as my friend.” Pearl says, “I will. I would love to.”
The moment passes, and their hands fall. “Oh, but you can’t go like that, darling,” Rose says, a hint of a giggle in her voice. “Do you think you could manage something just a little bit more…fancy?”
Pearl looks down and tugs at the ill-fitting uniform she’s been dressed in every day of her life. “Fancy? Me?”
“Come on, now, I’m sure you can think of something.”
“Well…what do you have in mind?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Rose says with a shrug, unable to keep a hint of affectionate mischief from her voice. “I think you’d look awfully pretty in blue. Something to bring out your eyes.”
Pearl’s hands fidget shyly against her whisper-thin skirt. “I…I guess I can try,” she says.
“I think you should. Just try. See what you can come up with.”
She takes a deep breath and presses her fingertips to her gem. For a moment, her already vague and shimmery projection dissolves into light. Then the uniform is gone, and in its place is an understated but striking party dress, intricate turquoise lace spilling from a waistcoat-like bodice that faintly recalls, but does not imitate, the factory-issue vest. “What do you think?” she says. Her outstretched fingers, her bright smile as she twirls to show off her creation, belie the nervous pride of an artisan awaiting a client’s critique on an undeniably exquisite work.
“It’s beautiful,” Rose responds, the release in her voice surprising her. It is beautiful. She is beautiful. Her body looks more solid, more confidently there, and all her colors seem more vibrant. “Did you just…come up with that all on your own?”
“Well,” she replies, “it’s little bits and pieces of things I’ve seen around.”
Rose nods approvingly. “It’s perfect. Now, one more thing.” With a wave of her hand, a shimmer of her power, she draws a satin headband with a plume over Pearl’s gem. “Much as I’d love to show you off, I’m afraid it just isn’t safe. Like I said, it isn’t really the sort of place you take a pearl. Some gems just…don’t understand how cruel they’re being.” She doesn’t say that the professional- and soldier-class gems who frequent the lower blocks of Petra Basileia would likely see Pearl as an uncomplaining plaything at best. “Thank goodness you’re not quite uniform. They’ll buy that we’re just another quartz and aventurine sneaking off the base to have some fun.”
“We sure aren’t, though,” Pearl says, in a voice breathy and bewildered, eyes wide and averted from her as if she is speaking this aside to an unseen second audience.
When the small, sleek hovercraft is pulled around to the front of the house, Pearl looks at Rose, familiar with her habit of riding shotgun. With her eyes only, she pleads with her to make an exception. Riding alone in the back of the cab—the place where the commander, the owner, the most important gem in the equation belongs—would just be too weird. Thankfully, the wordless plea is registered. “Sit here with me,” she says, motioning to the back bench seat, and drapes her arm over the top of it so that when Pearl perches at her side, she’s nearly concealed—shielded from the street and its eyes. They speed away toward the light of the city, seated scandalously side by side, the gap between them electric with potential.
***
“You gotta stop playing with your dress,” Rose whispers. “You look like you’ve never seen anything like it before. We’re blending in, remember?”
“Sorry. It just feels so different.”
“I know,” she says, gentling even from her previous soft tone. “Just try not to look so…I don’t know.” Every possible ending to the sentence is something Pearl can’t really help, something that would sound much more personal than she means it. She realizes she’s never thought so much about how others might look at a low gem, at a factory gem, at a defective gem; she can feel Pearl’s constant consciousness of it, and her complete powerlessness to respond to it in the absence of the usual social grace of her kind. She does as she’s been taught without any further adaptation. The best Rose can do is make awkward suggestions.
They walk down the street hand in hand, part of the nightlife throng. “This is the place,” Rose says, opening a nondescript door with a pulsation of her gem’s light. She steps inside, sweeping over the threshold in one long stride. Pearl hesitates, but Rose grabs her wrist and pulls her in.
She blinks in the dimly lit room. A band pounds fluorescent, delirious melody into the shaking walls. She watches them play in an apparent daze, enraptured by the music. Her name is called four times before she looks up and follows Rose to a sofa at the edge of the room.
Pearl hesitates before she sits down—every moment, she has to remember that she is not a pearl tonight, has to remember to perform the part of a full-fledged gem. Even though Rose tends not to play by the same rules most of society does, they usually make a show of it when they’re in front of others; habit urges her to kneel on the floor beside the table, but she sucks in a breath and slides onto the cushioned bench next to her commander-slash-friend (slash-date—she knows what this looks like, especially with Rose insisting on holding her hand and calling her darling, things that she loves at home but finds deathly frightening here).
For several seconds, she just sits, eyes closed, swaying to the music. It’s wonderful, complicated, soaring. She wonders how everyone stays so composed. The whirling dancers laugh lightly or stare with a sort of impotent aggression, as if they were competing somehow. Rose taps her on the shoulder and says something, which is not remotely audible over the music and the noise of the crowd. “I’m sorry, what?”
She repeats herself, possibly increasing in volume, but it’s still only a slight consonant hiss. Her mouth moves some more. Pearl squints at her.
Finally Pearl pulls the edge of the headband up, cups her hand around her gem and projects a tiny field of text onto her palm, where only Rose can see. In careful, rounded type, it reads I can’t hear a single word you’re saying.
Rose laughs. She points over to the curtained windowsill, and once Pearl brings the illuminating glow of her gem over, she traces her own message in the dust: DANCE W/ ME?
As they make their way onto the crowded floor, Pearl shuts out everything but the music and Rose. If she watches the eyes, the bodies, the storm-like sweeping and rippling of fabrics, she knows the sheer amount of it will freeze her where she stands. She keeps her eyes glued to the place where their hands are clasped together between them, and she’s dimly aware of several gems moving out of their way as the band begins to strike up a new song. Even with her importance disguised, Rose seems to have that effect wherever she goes—she’s very tall, of course, and very, very beautiful, even with most of her face vague behind a veil, and the way she floats across a room is arresting, difficult not to stare at even when one is trying to be polite. Pearl feels an unfamiliar, inexplicable rush of joyous pride. She is going to dance with the gem everyone wants to look at. And she’s going to show them, free of all the usual context, exactly how such a gem should rightfully be danced with.
The music begins again in a shower of sparkling notes, and as she tosses her head and lets her arms fall outward like gossamer ribbons she sees Rose a few feet before her take in a breath. She smiles, and her smile is returned. Rose’s hands twist and slice into the air like blades, crossing at the wrists above her head as the beat kicks in and she sweeps into motion. They move toward each other, mirroring, eyes ecstatically locked, shoulders and feet punching vibrations out of the air. Pearl steps forward and executes four lightening-quick pirouettes in the space between them, and all at once Rose’s hand, warm and vibrant, catches her sinuous wrist midflight and bends her low, keeping her, for a moment, a captive audience to the smooth oscillations of her hips and the light bounce of her bare feet on the shining tile. Their faces are inches apart. Pearl mouths “What happened to your shoes?” but Rose just grins and twirls her around to her back, where she rises to her pointes and lets their arms drift and fall against each other a moment before their eyes meet again, over their shoulders, and their fingers lock together. Rose bows low and Pearl’s feet leave the floor, her legs sweep upward like wheel spokes, her toes very nearly touch the ceiling and then she summersaults flawlessly over her partner’s head, barely disturbing a single curl.
The showy move garners spontaneous applause from the other dancers. There are whispers around them, but not the kind that have followed them on the few other occasions they have been together in public. They comment on their timing, their synchronization, their grace. Pearl distinctly hears someone say “she looks almost like a pearl,” and that should probably make her wary, but instead she smiles. She imagines it’s much nicer to be compared to a beautiful living accessory when you’re expected to be a great deal more than that. These gems think—correctly—that she loves the song the band is playing, feels it deep inside her, loves her dancing partner, lets her feet rejoice out of fully-conscious bliss, not programming. In only a few more measures, she forgets that they are there at all.
Rose feels the music too, of course, and the stares, but mostly she’s just thinking about how she could watch Pearl dance for all of eternity and be perfectly content. That she dances up to her, that she takes her swanlike jumps into her embrace, is almost overwhelming. The universe has moved precisely into position to allow this moment, and she is unspeakably thankful.
When the beat slows and they stay closer longer, skirting propriety even here—will anyone really notice if Pearl’s hands follow Rose’s when she draws them slowly over hips and upward through her hair? Well, either way it’s happening—their feet begin to the hit the floor in perfect unison, neither of them can turn without the other being ready to let her partner’s hand fall into her own. Everything ceases but rhythms and shapes and the places where their bodies touch each other, the lines where their eyes meet. They don’t even notice that they’ve fused until the band, in uncontainable shock, stops playing.
Rainbow Quartz turns, at first simply wondering why the music has ended so suddenly. Then she notices how far away the floor is. Her hands fly to her face, her sides, to each gem. All around, club-goers stare open-mouthed and stock still, as amazed and unsettled as she is. Her teeth clench as if she’s about to open her mouth to admonish them for the way they look at her, but instead she makes a breakneck turn and sprints for the door.
She unfuses in the alley behind the building, and Rose stares into space for a second, dazed with what’s just occurred, before she notices Pearl nearly hyperventilating beside her.
“Pearl? Are you—what was—”
Pearl can’t speak. She’s physically contorted with panic, doubled over, long fingers arching, clawing at nothing. Her face is so feral, so hunted, so far from the untouchably civilized contentment that gems like her seem to effortlessly project, that for a moment Rose isn’t sure what’s happening to her. Finally she cries out, voice ragged: “I didn’t mean to! It—it just happened!”
“Pearl—”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, there was nothing I could—it just happened, please understand—oh—” Her voice breaks, her hands fall, and she turns her face upwards toward the summer moons. The tears that gush down her cheeks sparkle in their light. She gasps horribly, as if she’s been hit in the chest with a brick.
Rose, helpless in the shadow beside her, says, “Are you crying?” although the answer to this question is blatantly obvious.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” she says, with a frustration that takes Rose so by surprise that she almost laughs, thought she’s thankfully able to hold it back. It’s hard to believe that this is the same gem who was beaming and blushing in the shelter of her private rooms a few hours ago. “I’m—” she grips the side of her head, reeling with the force of her own emotions, “—through, or whatever you want to call it.”
“I…guess I didn’t think you could cry.” As soon as she says it she realizes how stupid—and how completely thoughtless—this too sounds. Why wouldn’t she be able to cry? It’s more that, in a million years, Rose has never seen a pearl cry, even in response to the worst mistreatment. They simply bow and apologize, without a single crack in their quietude, their perfect composure.
“We’re not supposed to,” Pearl responds, tears still pouring. “But at this point, who gives a damn?” She curls up, gem pressed between her knees, and succumbs to body-shaking sobs. “This was the best night of my entire life, and now it’s all over, everything. I should have known it was all too good to last.”
“Pearl…please stop crying…”
“I can’t. And honestly, I’m not even going to try. You can’t send me away twice. They can’t crush me twice. Go ahead and get mad at me. Get your weapon out and clock me in the head if it makes you feel better. I do not care anymore, I just do not care!”
“Pearl.” For all her nihilistic declarations, Rose’s slightly raised voice still shuts her up like a ball gag as a matter of instinct. “I am not going to send you to be crushed. Nor am I going to try to beat you up with a shield. Even if I wanted to, it would look stupid.”
Pearl looks at her blankly for a second, then bursts forth with a gale of unhinged laughter, not so much because she knows Rose is joking to calm her down but because she’s overcome with relief and confusion. Her tears haven’t stopped.
Rose reaches for Pearl’s hand, draws her slowly over and places her head on her shoulder. “I’m sorry I told you to stop crying. I meant—I just wanted you to feel better. You had a terrible scare; of course you’re upset. Go ahead and cry, darling. It doesn’t bother me.”
“I—I’m sorry I was so rude before,” she stammers, not bothering to lift her face from the fabric of Rose’s dress collar. “There isn’t any excuse for it, I just get so—I feel like—like no matter how hard I try, I’m always doing the wrong thing. And sometimes it feels so hopeless that it’s almost like—none of it matters at all. But—you matter. You matter so much to me. I want to make you happy any way I can.” At this point she finally does look up. “How are you planning to not have me recycled? That was…at least three kinds of illegal…”
“Nobody there knows who we are. It’s not as if we’ll exactly be top-of-the-list suspects.”
Pearl grins crookedly. “I guess you’re right. We still need to get out of here before the authorities show up, though, or we’ll have a lot more explaining to do.” She tries to get to her feet and pitches forward, her eyes flying wide open as she’s suddenly hit with her first experience of post-fusion pain.
“Steady, there, darling,” Rose says, reaching out to support her. She looks up, alarmed by this development. “It’s normal,” Rose assures, “unfusing suddenly is awfully hard on the gem. You’ll be alright, just give it a little while.”
Her face furrows with worry. “Does it hurt you, too?”
“I’ve built up a bit of a tolerance. Been in and out of a lot of fusions in my day. Although I must say, none quite like this.”
“I’m so sorry, Rose, it must have been terribly uncomfortable—”
Before she can finish, Rose presses a finger to Pearl’s lips—she instantly regrets it for its implied condescension, but the deed is done—and whispers, “Don’t, please don’t. I loved fusing with you. For that second before it all fell apart, I was the happiest I’ve been in a long time.” In a haste to atone for her earlier silencing move, she quickly asks, “Were you alright? Was it too much?”
Pearl sighs so hard she nearly falls over. “It was wonderful,” she replies. Rose rearranges her hands to hold her more firmly, and the impression is one of catching her before she even has a chance to stumble. Under the city lights, Pearl’s pale, iridescent eyes reflect a rainbow of colors, but Rose could swear they also have a light that comes only from the inside.
She bends down and sweeps her—my Pearl, my irreplaceable treasure—into the welcoming softness of her arms. “Let’s go home, darling. You’ve had a much bigger night than you bargained for.”
“Oh—Rose, this won’t be necessary, I’m perfectly capable—”
“Of course you’re capable. I’m just carrying you for the sake of efficiency. Surely you can appreciate that.”
“Well,” Pearl replies, letting her head and exertion-warmed gem drop heavily against Rose’s shoulder, “for the sake of efficiency, I suppose I can live with it.” The touch may be coincidental, but Pearl entertains the dizzying possibility that Rose just brushed a gentle kiss across the top of her head.
As they walk, a few points of mutual knowledge hang heavy in both of their minds, and remain pointedly undiscussed. First, that fusion requires perfect cooperation, perfectly synchronized minds and bodies. Second, that a mental sync, a romance of intellect, between a diamond and a pearl is unheard of and by most descriptions impossible. Third, that the two of them have achieved this supposed impossibility without actually trying, which would seem to indicate something between them that is disturbingly and inarguably nature, a force that neither they nor all of their world can control.
In a few moments they reach the corner of the street, where the driver has pulled their vehicle around the block for them. “Is she okay?” she asks Rose, indicating Pearl folded sleepily into her embrace, arms flung around her neck.
“She’s alright,” Rose answers, “she’s just had a bit of an adventure.” Pearl blushes at all the disreputable things this euphemism could possibly refer to, but realizes that none of them are as disreputable as what they actually did. Rose lays her gently down across the back seat and climbs in beside her, letting her head rest against her, steadying it with one feather-light hand.
Pearl watches the streetlamps go by above her, feeling their rhythm in her ears. Somewhere under all the states her mind as been through tonight—fusion, hysteria, lawless abandon in the face of certain death, the works—a part of her is still swept up in music, in dancing, in Rose’s unfathomable beauty. She smiles up at her, and for the second time that night basks in the reciprocal smile. “I’m the luckiest gem this side of the second sun,” she announces, softly, mostly just to herself.
Rose keeps playing with her hair and stares straight ahead. She can’t just say no you’re not. She can’t just remind her that ten minutes ago she was shaking in terror, certain they were going to have her killed. “I just want you to be safe,” she says, making an honest statement in lieu of a response.
“See there? Lucky. The luckiest pearl alive, certainly, especially considering…everything.”
Rose looks down at her. “We should dance more,” she says. “At home, I mean. When we’re alone.”
Pearl smiles so wide that the corners of her mouth seem to strain for space in the confines of a face designed to be elegantly expressionless. “I’d like that,” she replies.