Beginnings
It starts off as a fascination that passes the time. Her predecessor, an asymmetrical, round-bellied, too-nice-for-her-own-good, indigo-hued tanzanite, supplied the inmates with knowledge of what was happening in the other cohorts—which Supervisors to watch out for, who was quarreling with whom, that kind of thing. The more exciting stuff—the drama—was reenacted by gems who shapeshifted into their own approximations of the subjects for the entertainment of the rest of the cohort.
But Tanzanite, with her distinctive kite-cut gem, is always with them. Though she does tend to frustrate her cohort by always being the last gem to leave the rec center, she never sneaks off to consult with anyone. Sometimes she gives friendly waves to other cohorts as they transition (if they pass each other—which, with the tangle of halls in Unit 6, is a rarity at best), but she’s stupidly friendly as a general rule. Besides, what sort of gossip can be conveyed with a quick wave, anyway? Certainly not the sort with the level of detail that Tanzanite divulges to the cohort on a regular basis. The only unusual thing Tanzanite ever does is read. She must have read all of the beaten-up novels in the rec center at least a hundred times now, enough that she can probably recite them all by heart, but do you think that stops her?
“Isn’t this strange to any of you?” Apatite says to her friends. “What if she’s just making it all up?”
Tourmaline shrugs her lace-encrusted shoulders. “So what if she is? That doesn’t change how entertaining the stories are.”
Citrine and Ruby, who are sitting companionably on either side of Rhodochrosite, both make apathetic gestures. They’re not quite in tandem, but they do get close.
“I’ve never thought too much about it, to be honest,” says Ruby.
“Have you ever tried asking her?” says Rhodochrosite, ever the voice of diplomatic solutions.
“Why should it be a secret?” says Apatite pointedly. “If Tanzanite is making everything up, that’s fine—I’m just as bored as the next gem—but she needs to be up front about it!”
“Maybe she thinks everyone already knows,” Rho suggests.
“It’s possible,” says Citrine. “I mean, how long has this been going on? A couple hundred years, at least.”
“I think it’s been a millennium already,” says Tourmaline, idly inspecting the tips of her pink-streaked hair.
“So none of you are curious about how she’s doing any of this,” says Apatite flatly.
“Um, no?” is Ruby’s reply. “What’s there to mind? It’s not like she’s hurting anybody.”
“I’m with Ruby,” says Citrine. The light orange hue of her face immediately deepens to a sunset color. “I mean, I agree! That’s all; I just agree.”
Tourmaline raises her eyebrows. “Methinks the gem doth protest too much.”
Apatite is inclined to agree, but she’s known about Citrine’s attraction to Ruby for the last several years now, so this is nothing new to her.
Rho laughs, her slender form shaking with it.
Ruby leans around the pink gem to give Citrine a suspicious look. She almost understands what she’s seeing—it’s painful to watch. “What’s wrong with you?” the corundum asks.
“Nothing! Nothing at all—I don’t even know why you’d bring anything up. Aren’t I acting normal?”
“No.”
“Tourmaline, no one is asking you!”
This discussion is getting nowhere. It is also getting horrendously off topic, and that only aggravates Apatite more.
“How are none of you more concerned about this?” Apatite bursts out. She leaps to her feet. “That’s it; I’m confronting her directly!”
Apatite marches off before any of them can say anything, though a deeply cynical part of her muses that they won’t because they don’t care one wit about Tanzanite and her elaborate lies.
The indigo gem smiles tranquilly when a shadow passes over her book. “Hello, Apatite! How can I help you?”
“How are you getting all of this information?” she demands, her arms akimbo and her voice harsh—no pleasantries here, no ma’am!
Tanzanite blinks. She is either impressed or confused, and to be honest Apatite doesn’t know her well enough to tell the difference between the two. “What information, specifically, do you mean?” she wonders. “I have a couple of sources.”
“Where?” Apatite throws her arms in the air. “Unless there is some secret coded language embedded into the structure of this very rec center, you see and interact with all the same gems as the rest of us, and we are kept pointedly isolated from the other cohorts, so how, Tanzanite? Explain to me how these sources of yours work.”
Tanzanite’s smile falters. She shuts her book. “You’re really worked up about this, aren’t you?”
“What was your first guess?” snaps Apatite. She jabs a dark blue finger in the round gem’s direction. “Unlike everyone else, I’m on to you and these stories you’re passing off as interpersonal information.”
Tanzanite glances down at the book in her lap, and then, for no reason that Apatite can fathom, bursts into laughter. She laughs so hard that tears well up in the corners of her eyes, and she starts wheezing.
Apatite lets her have her fun, but she’s staring the other gem down the entire time, her teeth gnashing and her fists clenched and quivering. What is so damn funny? She doesn’t know, but as surely as she will never see the light of day again in her life, she is going to find out.
“I guess that is what it looks like, isn’t it?” Tanzanite finally gasps, wiping away her tears of amusement. “Oh, my stars, I haven’t laughed like that in a while. Thank you, Apatite. I needed that!”
“Are you going to dance around the subject for the rest of our recreation period, or are you actually going to answer my question?” Apatite grounds out. It feels like she is being played with, and Apatite does not appreciate that. The more time that passes, the less she likes Tanzanite.
“If you really want to know—”
“Why would I still be standing here, if I didn’t really want to know?”
Tanzanite smiles like she understands Apatite’s frustration implicitly, but how the hell could she? She’s the source of it!
“Here, sit down.” Tanzanite pats the space on the bench next to her. “I can show you what I’m actually reading.”
This gives Apatite pause. Her shoulders relax, and her fists unclench. “Just like that? You’ll show me?” she asks, feeling dull and wooden.
“Nobody’s ever been interested in the mechanics of it before,” Tanzanite explains. “But it might actually make things easier if I had someone else who could help!”
Slowly, Apatite perches on the edge of the bench with her palms resting on her skinny thighs. When she turns her head to look at Tanzanite’s old beat-up book, her thin, waist length hair slips over her shoulder and hangs to cover her expression from the rest of the rec center like a curtain. “Okay,” she says, though her demeanor feels rusty from switching gears so fast. Damn it, but her curiosity is getting the better of her. “How do you do it?”
“Each book is dedicated to the four cohorts here in Unit 6,” Tanzanite explains. “We don’t have numbers, per se, but this—” she lifts the book in her hand for emphasis “—belongs to the cohort who has the next shift here at the rec center.”
Apatite’s eyes widen. “You’re talking to each other in code.”
Tanzanite’s smile widens as she nods. “The Supervisors don’t come in here—and if they do, they certainly aren’t concerning themselves with a couple of dog-eared novels,” she says. She opens the book, and the first page of text has been folded practically in half. “It’s not hard, once you understand what you’re looking at—what word do you think they’re pointing at here?”
The moment Tanzanite says ‘point’, Apatite understands. “The edge of the dog-ear, of course!”
Tanzanite grins, pleased by her speedy uptake. “That’s the gist of it—you just move on chronologically from there. I must warn you, though: sometimes deciphering whether they mean the entire word or just the first letter can get tricky. Likewise with the breaks in statements—whoa! Okay, err, why don’t you give it a try?”
Apatite has snatched the book from her hands. She crosses her legs at the knee as she begins excitedly flipping through pages. Actual communication with the other cohorts, and it’s been going on for centuries!
“Hematite and Dolomite’s feud has been ruining morale for the entire cohort,” she says. “What are they fighting about?”
“They’ve always been rivals,” says Tanzanite with an airy wave of her pudgy hand. “They’ve just been acting up more than usual, these days.”
“Wait.” She stops, frowning. “The upper right corner is always the one that’s folded. Why is the lower left corner folded up on this page?”
“Oh, you’ve come across some of the choreography notes,” says Tanzanite. She leans over to check the page number that is hidden under the dog-ear. “This particular informant likes to use the wooden blocks to show the placement of individuals in their more complex notes—you know how they all seem to have arbitrary numbers carved into them? This is why. Whatever arrangement they are left in is replicated at the end of each recreation period—with the chess pieces, too. That’s why I’m always one of the last gems out.”
And here Apatite was thinking that the round gem just couldn’t figure out how to hustle.
“It’s brilliant,” she breathes. But then she stops. “You handle all of this information alone? No delegation whatsoever?”
“Not until now,” says Tanzanite with a small gesture. “Nobody’s seemed interested.”
Apatite has her own opinions on that. Hasn’t Tanzanite noticed the verve in which the five talcs huddle up and gossip with their sisters? Aside from her own observations, Apatite gets a lot of information about this cohort from them. Nobody really notices a gem with such low Mohs scampering about, after all—and if they do, talcs are so weak that they are presumed utterly nonthreatening. Even Apatite, with her Mohs of 5 and her shield of hair, can’t get near other gems the way that the talc sisters can.
The gears in her mind are beginning to turn. An aspiration is already asserting itself: Apatite wants this position. She wants to be in control of the information flowing discretely to and from this recreation center. She wants to streamline the system, to recruit helpers, expand, know everything.
Apatite hates being left out of the loop. It’s a pretty well-known fact about her—just ask her friends. It’s the reason she confronted Tanzanite to begin with, after all.
She looks at the cohort’s round-bellied, indigo-hued, soon-to-be-dethroned informant and smiles. “May I see the rest?”