Archive of Our Own

*

In Miami, Lapis calls the cops.

Jasper's face makes a portrait, the kind shown on museum field trips to fourth graders with no sense of art appreciation in the hope that this will be the thing that sparks it, the expression on her face just before MPD kick her legs apart and put her over their hood and read her rights - it takes two men, even though she's not fighting. Men only come after Jasper when they can do it in packs. It was one of the first things Lapis ever learned about her.

"What - ?" she hears, and then the handcuffs click shut.

*

In the student center, Amethyst stands in front of the soda fountain with the air of someone contemplating abstract art, and then proceeds to pour Cherry Coke, Pepsi, and root beer into the same cup. She samples the mix and says, "How's business?"

"Boring," Jasper replies. She has a way of smiling that shows all her teeth, back to the molars. "I've already picked up the crown of my career - what do you think?"

She sticks out her leg, turning it to show the monitor, black and blocky like a leech on her ankle.

Amethyst laughs, and pop goes up her nose. Lapis winces and fetches napkins.

*

In Ewa Beach for Thanksgiving, Peridot says, "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," Lapis snarls.

"Okay," Peridot says.

*

In Arizona, on the steps in front of a silver Airstream with flat tires, Jasper tells her that love is what climbs into the ambulance with you. She was sitting right here when her father finished staking tomatoes, stood up, wiped his brow, and then fell straight over. She points at a patch of gravel and she tells Lapis that it's all you come to in the end, all of your fighting, all of your yelling and all of your miserable surviving - lights, and sirens, and the person who claims the spot at your side, answering questions.

"I - I think there's probably more to love than that," Lapis says.

Jasper shrugs, and leans over, scooping a spider off of Lapis's ankle and ushering it into the shady patch of scrub under the trailer.

At the sound of tires grinding through the change from asphalt to gravel, their heads come up, and Lapis can tell it's not a neighbor this time by the way Jasper's shoulders lift. A minivan in a weird burnt off-shade of orange pulls in around behind the trailer, and Jasper hops up, greeting the rolled-down window with a burst of language Lapis can't follow.

She waits until Jasper turns back towards her in response to some inquiry, then stands.

"Hola," she greets the woman climbing out of the driver's seat, dragging several large tote bags behind her in the manner of almost every woman over fifty Lapis has ever met. "Como esta?"

Jasper's mother looks her up and down. She's as built as her daughter, but much prettier.

"You look like a good girl," she says, loudly and without preamble. "Can't you get her to do something about her hair?"

"Mami," Jasper protests. "I was in prison."

Her mother turns a scrunched-up expression on her, as if to say, and whose fault is that?

Lapis feels instant kinship.

"And you have at least five inches of roots showing. If you want to be a tramp, then be a tramp! Commit to it, or snip snip and go back to the color I gave you. Are you hungry?" This is fired at Lapis without pause for breath. And, "no, that doesn't count," when Lapis admits to Burger King at the terminal in her hurry. "That is pickled fat in a wrapper. Come inside."

"You eat Burger King all the time!" Jasper says, with the dawning sense that an alliance has already been forged and left her out of it. She puts a hand to her scalp, the black hair coming through under the bottle blonde.

*

In Kansas City, a shuttle runs from the Embassy Suites across the street to the amusement park every twenty minutes. Its headlights sweep into Lapis and Jasper's motel room as it turns onto the cross street - you could time a rice cooker to it.

At the table (already a small piece of furniture, shrunk down to postage-stamp size by its occupant,) Jasper draws her hair up off her neck and bundles it up, wrapping it around itself again and again until she's got a sizable, if messy, topknot. She does this when deep in concentration, Lapis has found, like a Beaudelaire orphan with a ribbon.

She flips an exacto knife over her knuckles and catches Lapis watching. "Want to check these for me?"

"What makes you think I know anything about it?" But she's already swinging her legs over the side of the bed.

Jasper kicks the chair back onto two legs as she approaches.

When she fires, it's at point-blank range. "Your arrest records are public domain."

It goes straight through her, exit hole gorier than the entry, and Lapis controls her flinch but finds herself covering her chest with her hand like she's checking for bleeding anyway. Straight-faced, she manages, "When forging a false identity, the most important thing is to keep as close to the truth as possible."

"Is that so?" If Jasper could put her teeth away, that'd be great. "Then if these pass your inspection, want to go to Argentina with me?"

"Ar - " And this is the other thing, how Lapis can be so certain she's got solid ground under her feet one moment, and then Jasper says something and everything tilts sideways, slides away like chunks of Arctic glacier she saw once on YouTube. She fights for balance. "What's in Argentina?"

*

In Argentina, they stretch the vowels out on everything they say, so "Buenos Aires" comes off the tongue like an ice skater's pirouette.

Lapis's real passport is on her bedside table at home. The one issued her at the start of this job is in a lockbox, huddled together with Jasper's like children at hide-n-seek - where in the U.S.A. are the names our minders gave us? The fakes they made in Kansas City are currently finding their way into the pockets of their coats, and Lapis watches Jasper pull all her hair out from under her collar with difficulty.

"It's not that cold," she says with all the superiority of a Mid-Atlantic transplant.

"Look at what the locals are wearing," Jasper replies, and she has a point - temperatures in the mid-forties seemingly requires that nobody's eyes or mouths be seen. People bobble by as walking clouds of down and lumpy scarves.

The job will take them further inland - an exhibition run down, returning its pieces to private collections. Part of a set, Jasper had promised.

Where's the rest?

And Jasper grinned, slow, and Lapis said "ah" and greed sparked at the dry kindling in her stomach. She wants to sit on this like a fat-bellied dragon on her hoard; if Jasper's so arrogant she thinks laws are for other people, how much evidence can Lapis crucify her on?

Jasper didn't miss it, her eyes lighting in return - misinterpreting the source of Lapis's sudden hunger.

They're better together, she said, and Lapis answered, yes.

*

In front of Amethyst, Jasper demands, "How much of it was true?"

Lapis swallows wrong, blanching as a lump goes down her throat at the worst angle. She rubs her sternum, throat working compulsively, and then says, "When forging a false identity, it's best to keep it as close to reality as you can. I didn't lie about much, just - "

Everything.

Amethyst's eyes move, tracking them. Out of self-preservation, Lapis is trying not to look at the concoction mashed together on her plate.

Jasper fires, "That's not what I meant and you know it."

Lapis says, "Shut up."

*

In Delaware, Steven jumps up and hugs her around the waist. "Thanks, Lapis," he says.

Lapis looks down at the curly black hair attached to her front, and gingerly sets one hand on top of it. "No problem," she returns, very soft. And, "Can I see it?"

"Yeah, of course!" He darts away, leaving a sudden cool patch where his warmth had been.

He returns, sandals flapping against his heels. In his arms, the shield is smaller than Lapis expects - but you'd be surprised, a lot of art is. The way you'd hear about it, you'd expect the Mona Lisa to be a grand portrait, some presence dominating whatever space she occupies, but she isn't - Garnet has textbooks that are bigger than the Mona Lisa. Likewise, the shield might only be a shield on somebody Peridot's size. On Steven's mom, it would have been an ornament.

She touches the surface with her fingertips, trailing them along the old, petrified wood the way one might read braille. A pattern of painted vines spiral out from the pale pink stone set in the center.

*

In a bank in a checkerboard town that got hopscotched at the point where I-35 forks, where apathy is a much bigger deterrent for theft than any Swiss security, Lapis has to surreptitiously check the return address because she isn't sure what state they're in.

She follows Jasper into the back, where she pulls another cardboard box out of her lockbox and sets it beside the first. She pulls back the feathered tape so that Lapis can see inside.

"Is that - " she starts, with shock, and Jasper's hand goes warningly tight around her arm.

Banks have security cameras. Banks have microphones. These things will work to their advantage - who expects a thief to keep her flagrantly illegal collection here? - only if they don't screw it up.

" - a nice meep morp," she finishes, lamely.

Now that they've been reunited, side-by-side in their boxes, it's obvious that the jasper carvings were made together; one is bent forward on its front paws, stained a sunburnt gold with its tail swishing joyfully around its hindquarters, and the one they picked up in Argentina is reared, but not in attack - they're playing. They were never meant to be apart. How did they get separated?

Jasper touches her hip to get her attention.

"I know where we should go next," she says, puncturing Lapis's bubble of satisfaction. "Are you with me?"

Can't you just enjoy this? Lapis thinks. Frustration skewers her insides, turns them over and starts to roast them. Do you always have to be launching yourself head-first into the next thing?

She imagines, again: this woman in inmate orange.

"I'm with you," comes from deep in her throat, and Jasper shows teeth.

*

In annoyance, Pearl says, "It's not the rarity of the rocks, no rock is that rare, not even diamonds, and we still don't know about 70% - I'm being approximate, it's actually much closer to 72% - of what's in our earth and our seas, much less the bits that sparkle. It's sentimentality that makes collectors - and so makes thieves."

"The value of so-called precious gems is falsely inflated by a biological desire to fluff one's nest with things that will impress the neighbors," Garnet summarizes.

"People are dumb and like to fight over shiny things," Amethyst summarizes further.

Lapis glances between them. "If they didn't, you'd be out of a job."

Garnet glances at Pearl, who glances at Amethyst, who returns the look with a shrug that says, Don't look at me, I'm just the TA.

The three of them hold a very unique department at their university, which means they hold a very underfunded department at their university and have a tendency towards alarm at every shadow that falls across them, like anything could be a specter of annihilation. They're run - the way most niche departments are - on charity, begrudging tolerance on part of the university board, and one stained, overworked coffee machine.

It's this last that Lapis helps herself to, settling into a rolling office chair identical to the one she just left in a nondescript government building downtown.

She glances around the outer office, at the diagrams and the flyers for next semester's courses and the plaques outside their doors with their real names on it - the exception being Garnet, who never bothered with a screenname when she signed up on Peridot's forum. When asked, she says, If people see that I have the courage and the confidence to be free and be me, then I hope it helps them do the same.

They aren't technically part of the geology department, nor art history, nor criminal science, although they blend all three - which is a headache for some university mail clerk to sort, she's sure.

No one has a better grasp of where the most precious gems in the world are kept. Anybody could name you an auction price, but Garnet, Pearl, and Amethyst have made it their life's work to be able to tell you the cultural significance of named pieces, and their history of being cycled between conquerors. Their dream is to identify what's plundered loot and where it originated, so proper credit can be attributed.

"Like the rose quartz shield," Lapis says.

"Yes," agrees Garnet. And, "Thank you for that."

"Steven's my buddy," Lapis says loyally, but she thinks she gets it, what Pearl was talking about.

You can buy baseball-sized chunks of rose quartz for as little as $10 on Etsy, but to the Universes … well. Steven's mother had been Samoan or Tongan, by the look of her, and Lapis herself is from the dusty side of Oahu, so she felt responsible, in her own way.

*

In a cul-de-sac of trailer homes, she kicks at the rust-stained red earth with the toe of her flat. She'd expected saguaros in Arizona, or big leathery aloe or cactus gardens everywhere, but all she's gotten is a nosebleed from the dry air.

"This is stupid," she says to the ground. "We're not even friends."

Jasper drifts along behind her like detritus steadily washing its way up a beach, the kind that everybody walks around without looking too closely, in case it rots.

"I dunno," she offers. "My dad told me once that it's the great kernel of humanity, that at the very center of ourselves we've never forgotten being friends. Like how trees in the forests take care of each other through a network of roots. It's just a matter of meeting people at the right time and remembering what's already there." Her mouth quirks. "We sprung out of the ground already knowing what we need to do for each other."

How does she make shit like that sound natural?

She should go back to those stupid power speeches - Lapis at least was never in danger of feeling anything but contempt for those.

"Well, I didn't have parents," she says acidly. "Just cousins and juvie."

And Jasper says, "Do you want mine? I always thought my mom had too much love for just one child."

"You can't use me to forget about the awful parts of yourself," Lapis throws at her, which doesn't have much to do with anything, but Jasper just blinks.

"Neither can you," she says, and then, "do you want to go see a movie?"

And Lapis says, "Fine, whatever," and, "what movie?"

"The one with Ellen Page in it."

Lapis's head jerks.

"I still have your Netflix password," Jasper tells her dryly. "You should probably change that. But I like your playlists."

*

In a pub around the corner from the Waterloo station, Jasper is being big and loud and American and Lapis wants to crawl right out of her skin from embarrassment. The contact's name is Ruby - one of several Rubies from the forum, and Lapis invited herself along to this information drop in the hope of pointing her out to Peridot later. She wishes now she'd sat somewhere else and observed, but Jasper's knee lodged firmly between her own has moved her from "unfortunate bystander" to "unfortunately, she's with me."

Someone bumps into Jasper's back - all Lapis can see of him is his shoes, some name-brand candy-colored things with their fat tongues choked by laces - and spins in a wobbly way to apologize.

He takes Jasper in and hollers up at her in tones of great, if drunken admiration, "Jesus fuck, you're a big cunt!" And immediately, "What the fuck happened to your face?"

His mate, faster on the uptake or perhaps just faster to spot Jasper's biceps, grabs him, covering, "Ignore him, ignore him, got dropped on 'is head as a baby like that Sheila girl from the news, you know? Not 'is fault."

"Yeah, but Sheila," the first dude leers, then says something unintelligible, and a third adds something Lapis wishes had been unintelligible, which cycles back around, and Lapis can tell the exact moment Jasper's amused tolerance flips over into something ice-cold.

She goes as flat and hard as a battering ram. "That is a soldier you are talking about."

Confident of their knowledge on the subject, and encouraged by their number, all three dudes hoot at once. Lasciviously.

In one smooth movement, Jasper stands, picks up the dude with the fancy shoes, and slams him face-first onto the bar. Glass and bone and wood all crunch.

"What the fuck," says Lapis to nobody in particular, and then she ducks.

*

In Buenos Aires, it's the coldest August they've had in fifteen years. Jasper wraps her memorable face in a scarf until only her eyes show, hunches her shoulders, and becomes indistinguishable from any other bundle on the street.

They practice together in the van; Lapis her driving, Jasper her accent.

"I can't tell you how accurate you are," Lapis goes, exasperated, and checks the wrong mirror before she remembers. "I don't speak Spanish, you do."

Jasper snaps back, "Argentinian Spanish is a whole different - Mexican Spanish isn't - you know what, it's not important. Beleaguered delivery driver is universal everywhere. How do I sound?"

"Fine on that front," she aims for soothing and comes out somewhere south of sarcastic.

Jasper rolls her eyes.

Cloak and dagger heist is new territory for her - I can only bash in windows with my head so many times before I develop a profile, she'd explained to Lapis, who thought of the dossier on Peridot's desk and made a noncommittal noise.

"Are you sure you don't want me to do the switch?" She checks one more time.

Jasper gives her head a shake. "It's only fair," she says. "No point in fusing your talents with mine if I can't prove I won't drop you. Sample me before you buy me."

"That's creepy," Lapis says, so flatly it startles Jasper into laughing.

*

In the morning, Jasper shrugs on a heavy carhart and then pulls down her scarf to reveal her mouth and mangled cheek.

"Kiss for luck?" she asks, in a voice so low and ground-up it's like a shift of gravedirt.

Lapis says, "sure," and steps in close, just to see Jasper's eyes flare wide with astonishment. She tilts herself up onto her tiptoes, and Jasper tips her cheek obligingly -

And Lapis shoves a cardboard shipping box into her chest, hard enough to drive her back a step.

"Don't ask for good luck, not when it comes to crime," she tells her. "You ask that bad luck doesn't find you."

"Right," says Jasper, and, "got it."

Fifty-two minutes later, she leaves the van in the Argentinian equivalent of a Park n Ride and walks towards the station. Five minutes after that, Jasper materializes out of the bathroom. She's walking too fast, Lapis notes critically - excitement hangs on her like holiday lights on a house.

Their schedule doesn't leave much time for error. Calmly, Lapis hands her a route map, folded backwards to show the transfers they'll need to make to get across the border into Uruguay.

Without anything even resembling calmness, Jasper drops down on one knee and with a flourish pulls an ice-blue statuette out of the - subtly changed - shipping box.

It's carved into a beast, some imaginative cross between a wolf and a bear, with tusks distending its lower lips and shaggy paws held up in preparation for a charge. Like Steven's shield, it's much smaller in real life than it had appeared on the website.

"Pure ocean jasper," Jasper says unnecessarily, but not without pride. "To match the one I already have."

"Put that away," Lapis tells her, waspish, but her mouth buzzes and her insides feel bubbled, shaken-up - they never forgot this feeling, even when Lapis forced herself small and flat and mirrored, the kind of surface her minders could look at and admire themselves, their accomplishment: Lapis Lazuli, trapped.

*

In front of the box office at the dollar theater, Jasper bends her considerable height down to the surprised old woman selling tickets, and Lapis peers around. A teenage babysitter herds three munchkins chattering excitedly about the Dreamworks movie, and another badgers a - parent? grandparent? - for change for the mini arcade. The theater was designed with a circus theme that's probably supposed to look fun, but in afternoon Arizona sun just looks sinister, or sad.

"Here," Jasper nudges her arm.

Lapis looks up at her and says, "I am done with prison. Never again, got it?"

"Okay," says Jasper agreeably, and then - to Lapis's profound humiliation - she pinwheels through the steps in logic that led Lapis to that announcement, so fast it's almost cartoonish, and her breath hitches, like she took a blow to the chin.

Don't say it! Lapis thinks in a panic.

"I - " Jasper's thumb folds down the tear-off portion of their tickets, but her eyes don't leave Lapis's face. "I - I wasn't too fond of it, either. So don't - I won't get us arrested if you don't."

Trembling, Lapis plucks her ticket out of her hand.

"Whatever," she says. "I'm not the danger."

*

In the courtroom, Lapis sits in the seats reserved for media and keeps her head down.

It doesn't work. Jasper's eyes find her unerringly as soon as they lead her in. She's in inmate orange, her hair cleaved straight down the middle like someone had taken an axe to her head, combed flat to either side. Without make-up or prosthetic, she looks greasy, smash-faced, like someone who's run herself into a wall a few too many times. It's not doing her any favors, and Lapis almost feels offended on her behalf, which is stupid considering all the work she put into getting her here.

She is not part of the proceedings. Her name and description have been changed in the testimony to protect her identity - they're still, after all, planning to send her undercover in the future. Usually, she never bothers coming to the trial. She sits completely still and listen to a lawyer present all of her evidence like she's not involved at all.

The defense says, "Doesn't matter. The Malachite situation was clear entrapment."

"Coercion," the prosecution fires back. "Bob was forced into collusion with the defendant to protect themselves."

"Protect themselves from what? How come it took so long to turn my client over to the authorities, if not to encourage her to commit bigger crimes?"

Lapis leaves right after the verdict is called, slipping past the bailiff while Jasper bends down to her disappointed mother. She tells herself to leave, to walk across the lobby and through the exit. She's still telling herself that even as she stops, and puts her hand against the wall, and pulls up her sock where it's ridden down in her shoe. If she goes around the corner, she'll have to pass through the gauntlet - an outer part of the courthouse where cameras and other recording devices are allowed. They'll have to take Jasper through here, for the newspapers.

From behind her:

"Lapis." And then, "Lehua."

There are some agents, she knows, who live for this: this moment here, when they confront their criminals and force them to acknowledge that they've been caught, outplayed, nailed to the fucking wall. Like it can be crushed down to "I won, you lost."

Having been both, it always makes Lapis a little queasy.

Jasper's wrists are locked together, but she presses a hand to her chest and says, "You look good in blue."

You look hideous in orange, she wants to say.

And, that's a stupid thing to say. I'm not a cop.

But she can feel her ID burning a hole in her pocket and it occurs to her, then, that all law enforcement probably looks the same to someone like Jasper. They had to her, once.

*

In the harsh lighting inside Sainsbury's, a single night clerk with a half-hour left to his shift looks like he desperately wishes this enraged, Arizona-colored woman had walked in, say, thirty-one minutes later.

Oblivious to him, Jasper stalks straight to the back - "away from the windows," Lapis advises, "I don't want those men following us" - and then whirls. She licks the blood from her teeth.

"I stole the bitch's diamond right out from under her. I wanted her to know what it felt like."

"Jasper … " Lapis tries, completely lost. Does this have anything to do with the three dudes she just knocked out like bowling pins in a Waterloo pub? Helplessly, she gestures. "Your … "

Fingernail marks claw gouges out of Jasper's make-up, and the adhesive's come up.

Jasper probes at it, curses, and rips the whole thing away.

"Victimless crime," she spits, "is not what she did to me. Come into my neighborhood and try to tell me it wasn't arson and that maybe we should look after our own community like that's not exactly what we're trying to do, like we're not at war every day against people like her - "

She sucks in a sharp breath, too angry to be self-conscious about the way this makes her torn septum whistle. Her voice drops.

"So I walked into her house and walked out with her most precious possession."

That said, she stands there, freezer packs of vindaloo and cut meats and Lapis her only witnesses. She continues, her momentum slowing now to a stumble, "And then I sold it. At a loss - because it was hot - but. I mean, I've been fighting since I was born - you know," and Lapis nods absently, because, yeah, brown girl, she knows, "but that was the first time it felt like a … victory."

Recognition sparks in Lapis at last.

"The pink diamond?" she blurts. "That was you? That doesn't … we had Bismuth down for that - I mean, didn't Bismuth …"

Jasper shakes her head. "Bismuth got it from me. It was intact when I made the drop, so whatever she did to it after that is," she makes a helpless, washed-away motion with her hands. "It's gone now, anyway."

*

In the middle of Auntie's Thanksgiving speech, Peridot leans in to say something to Lapis and accidentally gets a faceful of smoke as the wind changes direction, blowing up over the kailua pig roasting in its pit.

She bats her hands around, glancing over furtively to see how many of Lapis's cousins and crowd saw her do that.

"Psst. Hey Lapis. Did you two ever … " she starts.

"Ever what?"

Peridot bumps her fists together. Unmistakably.

"No!" Lapis snaps.

It comes out louder than she means it to, and an uncle turns around and frowns at her.

Peridot says, "ah," in such a way that Lapis thinks she might have answered a question that hadn't actually been asked.

*

In the aeropuerto in Montevideo, they get hung up in line half-way down the ramp while boarding their flight.

Grumbling, Lapis swings her carry-on to the other arm and turns their bodies so that Jasper's blocking most of the wind. The pamphlet advertised lively coastal breezes, and Lapis is discovering that in Uruguay, winter isn't so much lively as it is likely to find every gap, crease, or nook in her clothing.

She wonders if they've woken up to the clusterfuck they left behind in Argentina yet, or -

"Here," rumbles Jasper, and clasps Lapis's hands between both of hers - Jesus, they're oven mitts, Lapis thinks, distracted.

The line inches them toward the plane. Jasper's antsy, she can feel it - and she wonders if she should be too. But Lapis has flown too often to even convincingly fake being nervous about it. Back home, after they shut the ferry down because of what the pollution was doing to the coral, flying was the only way to get between her home islands. Somewhere in her apartment, she still has a pair of wings - one of those little clip-on kind that the airlines used to give the kids.

When should she pull her hands away?

"Have you met anyone else from the forum?" she asks.

"Amethyst and I have a lot in common," Jasper allows, after taking a moment to think about it. She kneads Lapis's knuckles. "And there's a Ruby in London I'd like to meet. But I don't think I trust Amethyst."

"Oh?" Lapis tries not to sound defensive.

A pained expression crosses Jasper's face. "She buys microwavable mini-tacos - you know, the kind patented by white people in Minnesota - and she eats them with ranch."

Lapis's creased eyebrows spring apart. Oh, well, when you put it like that …

She steps in closer and confides, "That's not all. She puts soy sauce on everything. And I mean everything. Rice. Pizza. Pudding. What's the point of making anything if you're just going to obliterate it?"

"Gives good hair advice, though," Jasper adds musingly, and Lapis stifles a snort, doubtful of this redeeming quality. Amethyst and Jasper have the same hair - something that apparently requires trips to specialty stores and overnights under a shower cap, all baffling to Lapis and her tousle-and-go cut.

On board, a little boy already seated turns away from his father in time to look up at Jasper as she searches for overhead compartment space - and then up at Jasper.

"Woahhh," he goes in a carrying voice, and his father's bristly mustache flinches with embarrassment.

He rallies, nudging his son. "Now there's someone who eats her greens," he says pointedly. He speaks in English, puzzling Lapis, but then she realizes he'd looked at their brown faces and assumed they wouldn't understand.

She inhales in preparation to say something scathing, but to her surprise, Jasper spots the starry-eyed kid first.

She shows all of her teeth at once. "High-five!" comes out of nowhere.

He has to strain against his lap-belt to reach, and Jasper tells him, "Nice!" in an appreciative tone. "Maybe one day you'll be as tall as me."

What, Lapis thinks, blankly. Who the hell is this and where did she come from?

*

In Kansas City, she has no trouble distinguishing the gleam off of Jasper's open eyes in the dark.

Jasper speaks first. When hushed, her voice doesn't come out a growl so much as it does something earthier than that, like tilling soil to get at whatever's arable underneath. It scrapes across the space between their beds. You could bury something in it.

"How do you pronounce it?"

"Lehua," Lapis answers.

Jasper echoes, "Lehua. It's pretty."

"Not really," Lapis flips over, pulling her covers with her and hiking them over her shoulders. "It's like Jane where I'm from."

"Still."

*

In her sunny office in Menlo Park, Peridot pushes a dossier across her desk.

She's got a colorful desktop arrangement of Tamogotchis the way some people have potted plants or little zen installations, and Lapis is reluctant to give up the warm patch the sun's moved her into. The tab on the folder reads "Jasper". Lapis eyeballs it, and decides her nostalgia for the lost baby alien she's acquired is more important.

She thumbs at the buttons. "What do we want her for?"

Peridot rolls her eyes, like, fine, I'll do your work for you.

"She's a smash and grab, mostly. Which should be a headache for insurance to cover, not me, but there's someone from the governor's office in Arizona that's really gunning for her, so that's how this wound up on my desk." She gestures vaguely, like the desire of her superiors to hot-potato anyone from Arizona is unfortunate, but understandable. "Judging by her online activity, she's planning to expand into jewel heists. We want her first."

Lapis darts her an amused look. "When do you think these geniuses are going to figure it out?"

"Be more specific," Peridot's tone is droll.

"Shouldn't they realize their nifty little forum of budding jewel thieves is monitored by the cops?"

Usually quick to assert that she is private security and not at all affiliated with public works - "oxymoronic," is her general opinion of them - Peridot stays uncharacteristically quiet, leaning back and folding her arms.

"I don't know," comes out of her after a long pause. "If I hadn't met Garnet, Pearl, and Amethyst, I might be one of you. Them."

Lapis blinks, and sets the Tamogotchi down.

"It's not like I don't understand the factors at play. I mean, I don't. Understand, really, especially lumpy old clods who break the law for … what, fun? Idiotic - I like it when we squash those. But people who do it out of necessity … or even people who do it in protest … I mean, this is America, if you don't see tea and want to dump it in the closest body of salt water I'm not sure we got the same memo about oppression and law-breaking as a statement.

"But," she spins her chair around, slowly. Her feet kick, not long enough to touch the ground. "I chose this as my career because I firmly believe that everybody wants to do good. I want to do good, you want to do good; Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl make everyone want to do good." Her voice drops. "It's not about nailing bad guys - not for me, anyway. But to remind people that they do care about - about peace and love and the planet Earth? Yeah. Yeah, that," she finishes.

"Peridot …"

"Anyway!" Her voice turns chirpy, flying right over what Lapis was going to say. "Do me a favor, will you?" She scoots forward in her seat and flips the dossier open. "Find out if this is her real name."

Lapis glances down distractedly - and then double-takes.

"What the fuck," she says.

"Right."

*

In the heat outside a trucker's mecca just off the turnpike, everybody walks around already wilting - sunlight sieves straight through them, leaving them damp and strained. A bead of sweat trickles down Lapis's back, over the knotted scar tissue.

She's never had a choice about the jobs they send her on, but if this job lasts two days, that will be two long and exhausting days too many.

"It's a victimless crime!" her criminal argues heatedly. Lapis sits there and listens, feeling victimized. "The only people who bother to make jewelry fun to steal are the people with enough money to replace it."

"That's not always true," Lapis tries to interject, but the woman steamrolls right over her - Lapis has known her all of five minutes now, and can tell she's the kind of person who's never made a habit of stopping for others.

"It's easy money and you get to stick it to rich people. But that's why I contacted you. I need your help. This," she gestures at her face, "is memorable. We can start taking bigger game, but I can't do it alone."

It's funny, Peridot handed her a profile with height and weight typed right on it, but somehow it never translated to this: a woman so enormous that sunlight strikes her, and sticks. She is vibrantly auburn-colored, her hair dyed blonde. When she smiles, it shows every single tooth.

"How long will it take?" Lapis asks. "I need to get home - "

"Two weeks," Jasper says quickly, and Lapis darts a look up at her face. You're acting too desperate, she thinks. Not a trustworthy quality in a criminal. "Okay, maybe three."

Her bus pulls up, belching heat that makes the air shimmer, and Lapis stands, slinging her backpack over her shoulder.

Jasper grabs her by the wrist, and Lapis flinches, all the way through.

"Come on," she wheedles, her face too close, her breath as hot as the bus exhaust on Lapis's face. "Just say yes."

For a second, Lapis's cover cracks.

She thinks of the dossier on her desk, of the implied promise that if she keeps doing these jobs then someday she'll outlive her sentence. She wants, so badly, to be free. She thinks of all the people who want this monster of a woman put away, out of sight. She thinks of Steven.

She thinks, It will feel so good, putting you behind bars.

*

In London, Lapis discovers that Jasper considers a meal to be breakfast only if there's eggs and beans and rice and enough hot sauce to clear out her sinuses, and Jasper discovers that Lapis doesn't consider it a meal at all unless there's a perfect scoop of rice in the corner of her plate, the same way small children always put the sun in the top right corner of whatever they draw.

Everything else is just snacks, filler until they can find something real to eat.

"Has Ruby rescheduled - since the pub thing didn't work out?" she asks, all of her hard consonants turning mushy around a mouthful of sandwich from Pret. It tastes like cardboard.

Judging by Jasper's face, hers doesn't fare any better.

"Mhhm, not yet," she swallows her bite, grimacing. They've got their legs tossed over each other on the bench, oblivious to their surroundings the way people get when they've been living in each other's pockets for weeks.

Jasper balances her phone on Lapis's knee. "Here, look at this," she says. "Is this worth the price, do you think?"

The pages inches its way towards full load through the weak Wifi. "How would I know?" Lapis says, waiting.

Jasper says, "Of course you'd know. Nothing happens without you writing it down."

The moment stops, and skips, and goes on without her, and Lapis swallows dryly against the sensation that she's lagging too, a page not fully loaded. She's overcome with the peculiar urge to tell Jasper that she meticulously records details not because she's a neat freak but because she'll need them for the arrest record later.

She shakes it off.

She's too big and too horrible and too aggressive, she tells herself. And you don't like her.

*

In the theater, nobody else is there yet to contest their claim on seats, so Jasper picks the back row.

The floors aren't as sticky as Lapis expected from a dollar theater, but when pulled down, the seats lock in that position with a sad, dying squeal of their hinges. The carnival music comes piped-in through the speakers, and the ads running on the big screen are flat and static, the way Lapis hasn't seen since she was little - no Screen Vision or whatever they're calling it these days.

(She lost so many years there in the middle, that when she got out she didn't know how to mourn for things that had gone extinct, replaced by newer technology. She felt incapable of learning fast enough, thrown into the deep end and told to swim.)

Shaking her head, she continues grilling Jasper on the order in which she watched her Ellen Page playlist.

" - the correct order," Jasper answers, patiently. "You'd have my head if it was any other way."

"It's not the same any other way," Lapis points out, aggrieved, and then, "Why the fuck did your parents name you Washington?"

And Jasper's laugh booms through the theater. It drowns everything else out.

*

In her office, Garnet's talking to an undergrad, her voice mellow but firm.

"Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine, Jamie. You were aware of the deadline."

With little more than that, she shows him the door, indifferent to his theatrics. Sitting by the printer with a stryofoam cup of coffee, Lapis watches with clinical curiosity. Is this what she's been missing out on?

Garnet turns around, pulling at the hem of her leather jacket, printed with a giant star in purple and red. Lapis's plan to talk to her had been derailed by the presence of students, and now that she's been sitting on it she abruptly realizes she doesn't want anyone noticing that something's wrong, which of course means that Garnet's attention crosshairs her, unerringly.

"Lapis," she says, in a tone that makes Lapis feel dissected. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Lapis lies. "Fine."

Garnet's expression doesn't change.

"I - it's just. Jasper's out of jail," comes rushing out of her. "You know that, right? Has been for weeks."

"Who?" That's Pearl, sweeping out of her office. In one hand she's got an academic journal folded back, the other brushing the wrinkles out of her skirt. Lapis doesn't think she's ever seen her wear pants. "Oh! From that unfortunate debacle with Malachite?"

"Yeah," says Lapis again.

Pearl blinks. "Do we care what she does?"

"I - I guess not."

A minute movement brings Garnet's brows together. Leaning her chair backwards, Amethyst pulls one large, puffy headphone off of her ear. She glances from Lapis's face to Pearl and back again, and frowns.

"Hey, P," she says, and gets up, untangling all her wires. "Shut up. Lapis, let's take a walk."

Some lecture nearby must have just gotten out, because the hallway's crowded with bodies, all of them toting backpacks or roller bags. Lapis follows as Amethyst fords her way through it, oblivious to her height disadvantage.

"That's quite some bling you've got," she calls over her shoulder. "A present?"

"Something like that," Lapis turns sideways to slip between two students, tucking her hand against her chest. She should probably take the bracelet off, sometime. She can feel the cool press of midnight-colored stones through her shirt.

"Let me guess," Amethyst says, once the stream expels them into a quieter hallway. "You're scared because she's out, and that means if she wanted to, she could track you down. Any day now, you might have to confront her."

"I - " Lapis says.

"You're scared she'll be angry, sure, but you're even more scared that she won't be angry. Like, how do you handle that? Trust me, it's not easy," she says, and props a hand on her ample hip. At Lapis's dumbfounded expression, she quirks a grin. "I'm not just a pretty face, you know."

"I know," says Lapis. "I'm. Yes."

The grin loosens, turning softer and more sympathetic, rounding out her cheeks. She has the kind of sub-Saharan skin that's so black it looks almost blue, or purple, in some lights. "You two got pretty intense, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"And you're scared - terrified that it'll be like that again?"

This is worse than she imagined the talk with Garnet would have gone. Lapis feels pinned like a butterfly on a collection board, all her anatomical parts on display.

"Not - "

"Or are you scared that things will repeat themselves? Do you want them to? Are you feeling an urge to go on a crime spree and then get her arrested?"

"No."

"Then you're not the same Lapis you were. And I doubt she's the same Jasper." She steps in close, laying a hand on Lapis's arm. "In my experience, dude, if you can't trust in anything else, you can trust in that. Yourself. Your ability to grow. It's up to you."

Lapis thinks of Peridot, saying, All of us want to do good. Some of us are just slower getting there.

"Okay," she says.

"Good. Glad that's settled, because you don't want to know how much Red Bull is in me right now - undergrad papers are the worst - and I don't know how much longer I could have gone with this heart-to-heart. I gotta pee. Like a racehorse, dude."

*

In Miami, there's a statue of a woman who's nothing but torsos and arms; one pair is folded meditatively to brace herself upright, the other two pairs lifted in supplication. Her hair floats in a pantomime of weightlessness all around her head - the muscles in her abdomen, the individual strands of her hair have all been carved in loving detail.

Lapis leans in close to the glass, studying her upturned eyes - all four of them - and breathes, "She's beautiful. Look at how balanced she is."

"Look at her face," Jasper returns in a reverent whisper. "She looks like she could kill you."

Lapis huffs. "Why do I even bother. Art appreciation is lost on you."

"A woman who can eat me up and spit me out is art, and I appreciate it," Jasper fires back. "Do you hear that, Malachite? I appreciate you."

The statue says nothing. Patches of blue-green grow on her like mold.

She's not the largest pure malachite sculpture in the world, or even the most expensive, and judging by the drivel on the plaque beside her about ritual purposes, nobody even knows what she is - but here and now, in front of Jasper and Lapis's hungry eyes, she's the most important thing in the world.

Lapis steps in close, sliding her hand into Jasper's and letting Jasper duck her head in close.

The charade comes unconsciously now, two months and seven cities later - people have a natural aversion to couples, Lapis had offered, realizing that Jasper's scarred face and memorable height were disadvantages they would need to overcome. Nobody will want to look directly at us.

She can see the reflection of the illuminated figure in Jasper's eyes.

Jasper grins, and lifts their joined hands, and before Lapis can figure out what she's doing, Jasper twirls her out to the full extent of her arm. Her skirt bells out, and she pulls her back in. They swing together, Jasper's hand broad across her back. Lapis laughs, and Jasper's face tips towards her like she's trying to catch it.

"Let's make her ours," she breathes against her cheek.

Like a kiss. For luck.

"Yes."

*

In her apartment with her real passport acting as a coaster on the bedside table, Lapis pauses Netflix - and wonders when the light changed on her.

Didn't she make fun of Peridot for the same thing all the time?

Why are you sitting here in the dark?

I'm not! I was here first!

With some insistence from her bladder, she minimizes Netflix and takes inventory. She's in pajama bottoms and yesterday's top, now severely wrinkled. Her butt is numb, her feet sweaty under the blanket, and the scuzziness to her teeth combined with a swift glance at the clock makes a vague sense of shame curdle in her belly.

Her fingers move, clicking open a new tab.

Google loads, informing her it's the 175th birthday of somebody she's never heard of - thanks, probably, to having gone to jail before she got her high school diploma.

She searches, Arizona, and Beta kindergarten, and after a moment of thought, picks the year before the suspected Pink Diamond theft.

Her blood throbs in her ears. Her sense of being watched heightens, like in whatever women's petitionary they sent her to, Jasper somehow just knows that she's looking, knows and -

You're not joined at the hip anymore, she reminds herself sternly, and then words jump out at her from the screen.

11 Confirmed Dead in School Fire. Shocked Community Calls for Stricter Regulations.

She tabs through choppy coverage and the related articles, whatever's still available for free access. She hops from statement to statement - underfunded school in Arizona, building not up to fire code, why did parents keep sending their kids there if they knew it was dangerous? Why didn't they speak up? It's just what you'd expect from -

Lapis's stomach flips over and starts to heat up with anger. With long practice at translation, she takes the white media and looks underneath it for the truth.

It's like what they did to the leeward side of Oahu. It's the same story, different setting: you make a ghetto and then you punish people for living there.

"They're children," Lapis whispers to her dark room.

Inside her wide sea-grey empty bones, the huge cathedral arch of her, the specter of her sixteen-year-old self lifts her head to listen.

They were children, she thinks viciously at those long-ago authority figures. And you made it about you.

*

In the passenger seat of a Chrystler the same burnt off-shade of orange "as sun's vomit," as Jasper likes to say, Lapis drowses against the headrest. Traffic blowing by on I-35 rocks the van on its springs, and the ditch sunflowers have had all summer to grow taller than the windows, whispering against each other with every breeze. The sunlight falls through them, dappling Lapis's eyelids.

She shifts around, trying to ease the cramp in her legs, propped up onto the dashboard (she forgets, around Jasper, that she herself is not actually that short.) Outside, Jasper argues with the driver of the car that hit them - shoulders puffed up, voice overloud, all aggressive braggadocio. Lapis still wants to punch her every time she gets like that, so she drags her fist around in front of her, wincing as the links of her bracelet pinch her skin.

The stones are midnight-blue, pinpricked with stars, forming a solar system around the bones of her wrist. Lapis had found them in the pocket of her coat, and hadn't quite smothered her gasp when she saw them.

They're lapis lazuli, Jasper had told her, studiously not looking.

Yes, thank you, irony appreciated, Lapis replied, and after a moment of deliberate thought did not ask where Jasper got them, but now she sends the dark blue planets spinning around and wonders at their money situation.

They haven't sold the jasper statues, and Jasper hasn't asked her to help with any petty theft, so her backlog of sellable pieces must be running low. Has to be, if she's bullying that driver into letting them go without filing an accident report.

She frowns, and drops her hands.

The driver's side door cracks open with a sound like a bone breaking, and the van cants to one side as Jasper drops her weight into it, bringing with her the heat and smell of asphalt. Lapis listens to her rummage in her purse - well, "purse," it's a gym bag that holds a wallet, chewing gum, and brass knuckles - and then almost jumps at the touch of something against her cheek, so ghostly as to not be there at all.

There's a faint wheeze of an indrawn breath, and then Lapis asks, "What were you going to use the money for?"

Jasper's knuckles go still against her jaw, caught, and maybe that's what startles her into honesty.

"Plastic surgery," she says. "The best money could buy - Mom and I couldn't afford anything, otherwise. I was going to sell the pink diamond and then spent the rest of my life haunting the governor's office, powerful and beautiful - nothing pisses them off more than when immigrants succeed."

Lapis feels her lips curl up in appreciation, despite herself.

Jasper's voice drops. "Is there anything you really want? Diamonds? Gold? We could go to Dubai - between the two of us, we won't walk away with less than 22 karats of anything."

Lapis answers, "If you try to give me any diamonds, I'll make a chain and choke you with it."

Jasper's mouth pulls and she shrugs, like, okay with me.

*

In front of the freezer packs of vindaloo and cut meats, Jasper says, "Lapis," and, "your shirt."

Soaked through, it's starting turn cold in the refrigerated aisle. Her skin feels tight, pebbled, and a fine tremor runs through her without her permission.

"Someone threw her drink at me," Lapis points out, blithe, and Jasper draws herself up indignantly.

"I wasn't aiming at you - !"

Lapis says, "Jasper," and takes one of her hands, pulling it up her back.

"What?" Jasper says, and then her eyes widen.

She steps in close, her hand spreading flat and warm over Lapis's spine, fingers finding the indent through her wet shirt: a perfect teardrop-shaped gouge taken right out of her back, a scar that aches in bad weather and when she's surrounded by big men with loud voices.

"A taser," she murmurs in response to Jasper's inquiring look. She doesn't feel refrigerated anymore. "I was sixteen."

Going up and over a fence, so fast it was as if she had wings - and a sudden, bone-breaking, electric punch to the back. The world pinwheeling, kaleidoscopic; dirt in her mouth, her friends nowhere to be seen, county cops hauling her up by the armpits.

It wasn't until later that Lapis realized just how long she spent walking around in pieces, like that blow had cracked her clean through, fractured and messy and half-herself.

And then Steven hugged her around the waist and it all zinged into place, everything realigning, and she thought this, this with perfect and stunning clarity.

*

In Delaware Bay, Mr. Universe puts a hand to his jaunty sailor's cap to protect it from the wind and says, "You okay, kiddo?"

The tone of his voice rouses Steven, who'd been hanging over the railing, calling encouragement down to the migrating whales. He comes over immediately, face breaking open and leaking concern. Lapis takes one look at him and feels miserable, because he's trying so hard to make this fun for her.

And it isn't fair, how Lapis kept herself as tidy and closed-up tight as a prison cell, processing emotions through one at a time with too little fuss and too much dreary paperwork - and then Jasper came through and smashed the walls without care and forced her to build something bigger. Her cell became arches, her walls became thick marble stones. Her heart became cavernous.

"Lapis?" Steven peers up at her.

She hates how it made her feel, vicious and small and hungry in all that space, funneling so much of her long-fermented rage into Jasper until her fury became delight - this web she spun to trap one woman.

But she … she got used to Jasper being there.

I miss her, she almost says, but how do you lay that on a fourteen-year-old boy? How do you explain that she spent so long simply being able to reach out and have Jasper there, like an extension of her own arm? How do you explain that that absence jars her, sometimes painfully, like forgetting you've pulled a muscle and then trying to use it? How do you explain the self-loathing that simmers on low heat in the base of her stomach, because how can she ask for sympathy when it's her own fault she's in this situation?

How do you tell someone like Steven - to whom goodness comes secondary only to breathing - that if Jasper walked on board this rented boat in prison orange and said, Lapis, there's an old crone who's gonna send some supposedly priceless set of rubies to her corrupt son in DC, let's go steal it from them, the only thing stopping her from taking that extended hand would be him - and, by extension, the sixteen-year-old Lapis who never should have been tried as an adult.

So she wipes her face and she says, "I'm sorry, Steven. I'm fine."

And he says, "No, don't apologize!"

And Mr. Universe says, "Yeah! You gotta feel what you feel. We're the ones who are sorry - this can't be very much fun."

Lapis stands, smiling, and says, "No, I like the whales. Are they talking back yet, Steven?"

And inside of that cathedral space, she hunkers down small and tries not to make a sound, scared of what will come echoing back to her.

*

In the Underground, the tube doors slide shut on Lapis's heels with bare centimeters to spare.

The beeping stops. In a compartment occupied by much quieter, much calmer passengers, their heaving breaths suddenly sound disturbingly loud, their bodies too large and obvious as they grip the bars and crane around, searching the platform through the glass.

Lapis looks up at Jasper, who looks back with wide eyes, and then they both burst into breathless laughter. With a lurch, the train pulls away - Jasper grabs the bar, Lapis grabs Jasper.

Her eyes catch movement on the platform.

"Move!" she hisses, turning Jasper around and giving her a shove.

The train isn't moving fast enough, they're going to -

They duck towards the rear of the compartment, trying fruitlessly to keep low enough to not be seen through the window - and Lapis is aware, peripherally, that they're attracting more than their fair share of interested looks. For an undercover agent, she's not being very inconspicuous - but in her defense, art theft usually just involves a lot of red tape and desk work. She hasn't been actively chased in a long time.

Ruby had turned out to be a short, formidable woman battling a bad case of pink-eye that turned her right eye as red as her name.

"I thought she liked you!" she pants to Jasper, the both of them trying to make themselves as small as possible in the corner. "Why does she want to beat your ass?"

"I have no idea!" Jasper returns, with a note of such injured pride that Lapis starts laughing again in spite of herself, and they're off again, breathlessly wheezing for snatches of air, holding each other up as their guts cramp with it.

A middle-aged man nearby rustles the evening paper at them in a pointed way.

(She'll hear from Peridot later: a different security firm with no idea the territory was claimed, Ruby a hired bounty collector with a lot of ambition, several pissy phone calls about who spotted Jasper first and who's got dibs.

"You've most likely been listed as an accomplice, you know," Peridot tells her apologetically. "We're trying to clear it up, but you didn't give Ruby any signals that you were an agent."

"I'm sorry, I must have missed the memo on the secret handshakes," Lapis returns, dry.)

"What do you think they think of us?" Lapis whispers, pressed in close to Jasper's ear, her hair falling all around them.

Jasper whispers back, "I hope they think we're eloping."

For some reason, this strikes Lapis as the funniest thing she's heard yet, and she lets Jasper's arm around her waist hold her up, too breathless and punchy to bother with it herself.

"You're full of shit," she manages, with honest appreciation.

*

In the theater, Jasper says, "It's not the only thing they named me. I'm Latin, Lapis. I've got several names."

"Yes, but Washington?" Lapis persists, undeterred.

Jasper finally manages to wrestle the arm with the cup holder down, and Lapis jams her knee under it and pushes it back up again. The light's dimmed for the previews; Jasper's teeth make a grey gleam in her direction.

"One of my kindergartners asked me once if I'd been named after the dollar bill," she says, not quite an answer. "I told him yes, just to see what he would do."

"What did he do?"

"He studied me, very seriously, and then informed me that it was 'cool.' Dollar bills are a big deal when you're five."

"Were you named after a dollar bill?" Lapis asks, delighted.

"My parents named me after the idea of a homeland. Something I could carry with me in case I had to leave and settle somewhere else, like they did. All of it in my name - both sides of my family, a dream of a purpose for me, and my home country, packed down into the shape of a word."

Subdued, Lapis says, "That … sounds like a lot to carry."

"How do you think I got these?" Jasper flexes her arms, and Lapis splutters. The opening credits start.

*

In Florida, Lapis watches Jasper slice laps around the pool. ("We can't stay inside forever, that's suspicious," Jasper tells her laughingly, to which Lapis replies, "If somebody would tell me what the plan is - " and Jasper says, "We're waiting, we need better timing than this," and, "come swim with me, Lapis.")

Stubborn, she sits on a deck chair where the pool water had dried to salt on its plastic straps, obstinately with the excuse that her nail polish is fresh and also do you even know what's in pool water, Jasper?

"No, but tell me, Lapis, I'm sure it's fascinating," and then her head goes under when Lapis takes a deep breath to do exactly that.

She expels it, watching the shark-like shape glide towards the far wall, backlit by the underwater lights.

"Ass," she says, in summary, and then checks her e-mail.

Her inbox is flagged with several priority messages, the topmost of which is "Re: Deadline Extension," which she ignores in favor of opening Peridot's stacked chat.

You said three weeks and you've had nearly two months, Peridot's first message reminds her remorselessly. Payroll's called upstairs twice, and you know tetchy messages mean nothing unless they're coming from Payroll, and then suddenly everyone pays attention.

I'm advising you as friend, please wrap this up.

Do they want this done quick or do they want this done well? Lapis had sent back, and it's such a stock phrase in her line of work that her own eyes slide right over it, and she's the one who wrote it. We can hand her to the Argentinians or we can get her here on our own soil. I can put so many nails in her coffin they'll need the jaws of life to exhume her.

Gruesome, reads Peridot's most recent message, and there's no indication of tone but Lapis feels the approval anyway.

And then, I don't know if she's that big a fish, L.

Lapis's knuckles turn white around her phone case.

She is to me! she almost types, but stamps down on the impulse, hard.

How can she explain it to Peridot? Behind bars, she begged for freedom and this is what she got: the chance to use her skills to put away people who were just like her; cracked, molten parts and all.

But how much have things really changed? They're still telling her to jump, she's still asking, how high? and freedom is still out of her reach.

And Jasper -

Jasper reminds her of everybody who'd ever forced her into a corner; all the kids who came after her in the bathroom; all the adults who looked away in the hope that she would phase out and become the next person's problem; the judge and jury who looked at her hard face and the blank spaces in her paperwork where it said "parents" and decided she didn't deserve to be the child she legally was.

And if she can do this - if she can take Jasper and make her crash hard, then she can punish everyone. Like the harder this punch lands, all the people who've ever hurt her will feel it, too, wherever they are.

She rubs her forehead.

For Steven, she thinks, but it feels weak, even to her.

She thumbs her phone awake and types, You're the most important person in my life, you know that, right?

Wow, thanks, Peridot responds immediately - it's still office hours on the West Coast. Are you okay?

When this is over, you should come to Thanksgiving with me.

Oh, joy. Four days of jet lag and seawater in my underwear and your crazy cousins with their incomprehensible accents?

It's called pidgin, Lapis thinks defensively, but then another e-mail slides into her inbox.

Yes, please.

*

In Arizona, Lapis realizes that, maybe, as she tried to extend the Malachite job to gather more evidence, Jasper had been doing the same thing.

Hungry, hoarding dragons, the both of them, making collections out of each other.

*

In the rain outside the tube station, Jasper makes a sudden grab for her as she starts to cross the street.

She snags her by the waist, yanking her back up onto the curb (only they spell it "kerb" here, why is that, Lapis thinks inanely,) and swings them both around, just as a car careens around the corner.

The splash soaks the back of Jasper's legs, missing Lapis entirely.

Jasper roars outrage at the retreating taillights - the word "fuckbucket" makes an appearance. She's got one hand branded across Lapis's waist and the other curled around her hand on her umbrella to hold it steady. Her fingers around Lapis's are shockingly warm. Lapis looks up and feels suddenly airless, like one of those probes they send into unexplored deep-sea trenches in the Atlantic to see how far they can fall before they're crushed; her ribs let out a whine under the pressure and crumple inward, just like that.

*

In the waterlogged predawn Floridian light, Lapis crosses the parking lot at McDonalds, squeezing in between a Hummer stodgily extending over the lines and a beige sedan trying very hard not to look like a cop car and failing.

Her phone slips against her cheek.

"All right," Jasper's voice says in her ear. "Are we all set?"

"Ready and then some," Lapis confirms. Loud beeping and the smell of frying oil greet her as she enters. Her eyes sweep the seating area; at this time of day, the only people awake are road crews and delivery drivers, so she's not surprised to count three baseball caps sitting alone, and one plain-clothes police officer.

They're counting on that. In and out before the morning truly gets going; a mere fifteen minutes missing from the security feed.

"Are you with me?"

"I'm with you," Lapis murmurs.

"Then go get our girl," Jasper tells her. "And come back to me."

They hang up, and Lapis steps up to the counter to order an egg McMuffin. The plan's in place - small, forgettable Lapis in blue coveralls ("… would you ever consider a catsuit?" Jasper asked hopefully, and, "ow!") carting away the trash and passing Malachite out to Jasper, ready with the van. That'll be the moment - when she's out of Lapis's hands but before Jasper gets away, caught as red-handed as can be.

This is it.

She knows it like a weight between her shoulders, heavy as the wet sky outside, but her heart doesn't seem to care; it picks up the pace, screeching tires on asphalt and the roar of water in her ears.

Behind her, the cop says, "Miss Jones?"

Lapis closes her eyes and prays, Fortune, take no notice of me. May I pass through this without bad luck ever finding me.

*

In the theater, Lapis pulls down the seats next to her so that she can throw her legs across them, her flats just barely hanging on to the ends of her toes and her back against Jasper's arm.

On the screen, Ellen Page straightens her flannel-clad shoulders and announces confidently, "Then we'll just have to drill to the center of the earth."

Lapis turns her head, trying to remember. "So … Maria Washington … ?"

"Maria Marissa Washington Escalier Hernandes," rolls right off of Jasper's tongue. Her mouth pulls up, amused. "Maria Hernandes, for convenience."

She reaches across her body, sticking a hand out in front of Lapis.

"It's nice to meet you, Lehua Jones," she says. They shake on it. "I've been a long-time admirer."

"You can call me Lapis."

"That's funny, I've gotten pretty fond of being called Jasper."

"Jasper it is," Lapis says, smiling back, and -

And -

- and then panic kicks her in the solar plexus, driving all the breath from her body in a single blow. She swings her legs to the floor, blurting, "I - I'll be back. I've got to go to the bathroom."

*

In the bathroom, she stands behind Jasper and watches in the mirror as she applies her prosthetic step-by-step; fixing it in place, smoothing down the edges, and then spreading concealer over it to ease the lines of transition. The rest of her make-up glides on from there.

Lapis hitches her hip against the doorframe. To her, it looks like an obvious fake - it doesn't change color when the rest of her face flushes with rage or embarrassment. It doesn't tan, and doesn't quite meet up with the rest of the scar.

But, she supposes, even then it attracts less attention than the ripped-out cartilage underneath. Without it, Jasper's grin takes on a morbid death's-head quality, nose pitted out. It can't be easy, going out like that. At least with her own scar, Lapis really only has to explain it when she's in a bikini or a halter dress.

Jasper meets her eyes in the mirror.

Tapping excess powder off her brush, she says, "Did I tell you I used to be a kindergarten teacher?"

Lapis blinks. It had been in her file, actually, as the last stable job she had before her alleged crime spree started, but Lapis hadn't thought about what that meant.

She opens her mouth, and then remembers that someone who'd supposedly met Jasper online and allowed herself to be seduced by the promise of easy money and revenge probably wouldn't know that.

She feigns shock. "You're shitting me."

"It's true," Jasper says. "At Beta. It was a magnet school for kids like me - born here in the country to alien parents, most of them illegal. That's a lot of disadvantages stacked against them, and we just wanted them to have a fighting chance." Some memory strikes her, forcing a small and genuine grin out of hiding. "When I started, everyone joked that it was a good thing we didn't blow our budget on security. If anyone came in with a gun, I could take them."

"Why would - " Lapis starts, but clicks her teeth together. Dumb question.

Fast as it came, the humor vanishes from Jasper's expression. She ticks off her fingers, "Arizona. Brown kids. If you shoot them, their names get plastered all over the news and it shoves their parents into the limelight, which puts them at risk of being discovered if they're undocumented." She spreads her hands. "So many birds, one Second Amendment stone."

Lapis shifts. "Did anyone come in with a gun?"

"No," Jasper's huge shoulders jump, too sharp to be called a shrug. "They burned it down, instead."

It takes one beat, and then another, and then Lapis jerks upright as sudden understanding forks through her like lightning.

Jasper sees the alarmed flick of her eyes, and points, "beam to the face," stamped there in her missing nose and scarred cheeks, and then her arm, "a desk," and downward across her body from there, painting a picture of a fire-hazard building and a ground-level kindergarten room with no exits, going up too fast to escape.

"The kids?" Lapis clenches her hands on her arms. "Beta kindergartners?"

Jasper shakes her head.

Survivor's guilt, Lapis realizes, and she can visualize the exact space she'll fill it in on the paperwork.

"I should have heard about that," she whispers. "Why didn't - "

Their eyes crack together in the mirror again, and Lapis's jaw tightens, her stomach swimming subterranean deep. Right, of course.

"What about you?" Jasper asks, clearly wanting to change the subject.

Lapis just shakes her head. She grew up in Ewa Beach on the leeward side of the mountains, where there were yearly water shortages - imagine that, no water on an island - and too many people crammed into too little space, because housing prices on the green, wet, windward side of the island drove everyone who lived there out.

She went from junior year of high school to prison without any chance to find out who she was in between.

*

In the bathroom, reaching across her for the soap pump, Amethyst says, "Nah, dude, I wouldn't worry about it. You two needed to spend some time apart. But hey - bring her around sometime, will you? I wanna talk hair with her."

*

In the bathroom, she combs her wet hair and brushes the scuzzy build-up off her teeth.

She spits toothpaste into the sink and looks at herself in the mirror. Unbidden, her eyes slide to the right, where her imagination has no trouble conjuring a phantom silhouette standing there.

"You don't get to make me feel like this," she says, and throws her toothbrush into its plastic holder.

*

In the bathroom, she sends Peridot ten texts in a row.

Am I backsliding? How can u tell if youre backsliding?

Will this undo all of the progress I made is this one of those self-destructive impulses I need 2 say no to? & what's the DIFFERENCE between ""taking a chance"" and self-destructiveness?

What does it mean that I'm here?

What does it mean that I'm second guessing BEING here?

Jesus christ what if she thinks I'm here as a cop I'm NOT a cop but I need to talk to her about perceived authority bc she would let me she would let me do anything and I can't, peridot I'm scare.d i hate that person I dont want to BE that person

Would this make Steven worry?

Each text says "Read" right after she sends it, and she pictures Peridot in her sunny, chrome little office off of El Camino, or in her bedroom at home with her tablet open at her elbow and a frown pinching her brows together under the heavy frame of her glasses.

But it isn't until Lapis stops typing and leans against the sink, panting like she sprinted for her life to get here, that she replies.

Are you okay?

Yeah, fine, Lapis texts back immediately.

Are you sure?

Yeah!

The circus theme extends even to the bathroom; the wall tile alternates clownish patterns of red and blue, and it's making Lapis's head hurt. She pushes herself off from the sink and walks out.

The decision goes with her. It holds on to her elbow.

It kisses her cheek, for luck.

*

In the theater, her shoes don't make a sound - but before she even becomes visible, Jasper's face is already turned towards her. The dialogue on screen is darkly-lit, casting a gloomy glow on the seats. She sticks her phone, warmed by the grip of her hand, back into her pocket.

Jasper turns her knees aside to let Lapis squeeze past her.

As if she's moving underwater, Lapis puts a hand on her shoulder, swings one knee up onto the seat beside her, and grabs onto her collar.

Her downward movement carries them both over.

The seats squeal in protest as Lapis's back hits them, and Jasper slaps a hand against the seatbacks to keep herself from sliding off.

"Lapis - " comes out of her, a near-yelp. "What - ?"

Lapis feels incandescent, seafoam-tossed, and with all of her bravery she tilts her hips and spreads her knees, notching them against Jasper's ribs. She feels muscles jump through that contact as Jasper tries to rearrange, planting a foot against the ground and dragging the other one up onto the seat.

She wishes it were brighter - she wants to devour every second of this, the shock on Jasper's face.

"Are you sure?" is handed down to her, hushed, and Lapis knots her hands in the front of her shirt, nodding.

Jasper's expression shifts, then telescopes down, riveting on her. She pushes herself up straight and slowly starts to pull her hair back, twisting it around and around with deliberate care until she makes a topknot.

For concentraiton, Lapis thinks, with a feeling in her chest like her heart had battered itself bruised. She aches.

She pulls with intent, and Jasper looms down, and -

The light from the screen flips abruptly, music crescendoing. With sudden realization, Lapis shoves Jasper up, scrambling for purchase on the armrests she'd deliberately left up.

"Wait, wait!" comes flying out of her. "What - !"

She finally breeches the top of the seats and looks frantically at the screen. The camera view is too wobbly. She sees the barn from the previous scene, but where's the spaceship? Where's Ellen Page? Did she get to the drill?

"What happened?" she asks Jasper. "Did you see?"

"… No, I didn't," Jasper replies, in a tone that can only be described as ironic. Their legs are scissored together, and her hand loosely grips Lapis's thigh - and oh, hey, that's nice, that can stay there.

She cranes her neck back, trying to see the projector room.

" - I know they're scheduled and whatever but - could we get them to rewind it, maybe?"

Jasper's laughing at her now, and when Lapis rounds on her, offended, she leans in and says placatingly, "Okay, okay. We'll watch the movie first. We've got time."

She lets go, and before Lapis can protest the sudden rush of cool air over her leg, Jasper's big hands cup her by the jaw the way one would a peony in the garden and pull her - well, up, really. The kiss lands all across her mouth.

With a noise, Lapis hooks an arm around the back of her neck and hauls herself in close, pinning them together. She opens her mouth, kisses deeper. This is at once new and instantly familiar.

Up against her mouth, Jasper says, "Movie. Lapis. Your girl Ellen."

"Yeah," Lapis agrees, and opens her eyes. This close, there isn't anything to see but patches of light and Jasper.

And.

And maybe Jasper is right, because it wails through her like an ambulance - light and noise, fear, exhaustion, and love, too, climbing into a corner to sit and wait and answer questions until all the rest of it passes.

It leans over and takes her hand, and it says, I'm here, don't be afraid.

Lapis nods, and rushes headlong into it.

*

In the desert night, after, Lapis finds that the temperature has dropped from bake-a-lasagna hot to cold in the time it took intrepid Ellen Page to stop an alien infestation in the center of the Earth from clustering together and obliterating all life - using the most powerful weapons in her arsenal: connection, friendship, and love. It was a good story, even with the chunk she missed.

She puffs out a breath, rubbing her chilly arms. Streetlights and stars illuminate the parking lot, and with them as her witnesses, she grabs Jasper's hand and pulls her towards the street.

The cold follows, prompting Lapis to shiver loudly and break into a run.

Jasper, who has considerably more room to store heat in, allows herself to be towed along with a bewildered huff. "It's not that cold," she says, clearly parroting what Lapis said to her in Argentina with the same smug tone.

"Shut up," Lapis throws over her shoulder. "We're going to miss the light."

Sure enough, the walk light counts down to zero just as they reach the crosswalk, and she curses, her momentum faltering.

Her thoughts catch up to her, doggedly chewing at her heels - how are they even going to manage this? Lapis works out of Delaware; Jasper's got an ankle monitor. How -

Jasper's wrist twists, nearly dislodging her hold, but then she uses her grip to reel her back in, and -

They don't so much crash together as they are caught; Jasper's free hand goes around her back, and Lapis pushes herself up on tiptoes, and it's almost a surprise to be kissing again, after all this, after everything.

She tilts her head into Jasper's shoulder, and Jasper into hers, and they kiss for a long time like that.

(The thing, she's discovering, about keeping yourself so small and locked up inside your own bones is that when your walls do get knocked down and new architecture rises in its place, it leaves you with so much room - she's got space to feel everything, to keep pieces of the people she loves without being stingy. All that was ever stolen from her now returned, tagged and catalogued in Pearl's professional handwriting, credited to its country of origin. Lapis isn't afraid of it anymore; this is home, all these arches and high-ceiling space. She's okay here.)

Someone in a nearby parked car rolls down their window and starts hollering at them.

That's tacky and rude, Lapis thinks - who still heckles women on street corners? - and then she picks a name out of the stream of Spanish.

"Hernandes!" Someone hoots again. "Ey, Hernandes!"

In response, Jasper releases Lapis's waist and flips them off without looking, momentarily dislodging their mouths. The car honks indignantly, and Lapis laughs.

"I liked Juno best," Jasper confesses to her, low.

"Yeah, I caught the reference," Lapis trails her fingers down her jaw, dropping her heels flat to give her calves a break.

This gives her an idea.

"Hang on," she says, retreating a couple steps back from the crosswalk. She tests the base of the streetlight, then uses it to prop herself up higher.

"There," she says in satisfaction. "Until we find a better solution."

"I'm picturing you in heels," Jasper murmurs, drawing in close. Lapis shivers at the touch of metal against her shoulder blades. "Six inches, at least."

"I could do that," Lapis says. "Or we'll get you one of those fancy heat packs for your back, if you're bending after me all the time."

"How often do you expect us to be making out, exactly?"

And it soars inside Lapis, a high sustained note that fills all that cathedral space, and Jasper must see it because she says "oh" in a rather small voice, and just like that they're kissing again, with enthusiasm.

When Jasper finally pulls away enough to catch her breath - a downside of missing a nose, Lapis supposes - she murmurs, flush against Lapis's cheek, "I have a present for you."

"Mmhmmm, that's nice," Lapis returns, distracted.

"There's a woman I talk to on the forum, picked one of the Diamond handles - Yellow. She says there's a sapphire on the move from Manaus, and she's planning on hijacking it when it arrives in the States."

Something hideous, collapsing is happening inside Lapis - all this space, so far to fall.

I told you not to say it! she wails internally. Don't ask me to commit the crime we were both imprisoned for, because I don't know if I can say no to you!

"- what do you say we go get her instead?"

There's a pause, and then the noise inside Lapis dies abruptly.

"Wait, what?" she says. "You're … you want to arrest her?"

"Yeah," Jasper straightens the strap of Lapis's dress, and blinks at her. "That's what we're doing now, isn't it?"

Lapis stares at her - for one beat, then another, until Jasper starts looking concerned.

And then Lapis flings her arms around her neck with a loud exclamation, and Jasper lifts her easily.

They spin in place, around and around, laughing and joyful and new.

*

In the end, it all turns out just fine.

"I'm still mad I've never actually seen a hoard of stolen jewels," Peridot complains, and Lapis says, "yeah, whatever," with affection.

-
fin