The Gem

A Chapter by Mel Jayne

Gems can be interesting. They might interfere. It could be dangerous.

There was a girl. She was on her phone talking to a friend that was going to meet up with her as soon as they were done with their job at the shipping port. Most of many cities produce came from the sea, once the cities had been ruined by the many bombings the corporations had taken to the sea to set up divisions so that various companies could produce food and other necessities and then sell to countries at a time. Ignoring glaring ethical problems for a second Gem had to admit that it was a smart business model. It also created a place for people who lost their jobs to the war.

Her phone vibrated on the table, Gem reached for it lazily but something hit her arm. Hard. She peered off of her cafe chair and behind the back of the table. It looked like a gemstone. She hadn’t ever seen a green one before, it was covered in intricate little patterns that must have been painted on meticulously, a strange thing to just fall out of the sky.

Gem looked around to try and find the owner of this strange rock. She instantly came face to face with a stranger that she had never seen around the town before. Not many newcomers came there any more. There wasn’t an easy way to travel anymore, too many roads were blocked off by shrapnel or cars that had been full of people when the bombs went off. Most people would come by boat but there weren't that many passenger ships anymore. People had given up on looking for their families gradually. What are you going to do, walk all over the earth and hope you don’t run into an irradiated area?

The stranger that was looking at Gem like she had insulted them was dressed in robes of crimson. Gem tried not to think about whether the colour was hiding stains of blood. Gem had come too close too many times to get near any of those types again. The person muttered with a heavy accent, they were from far away and had a hint of the dialect that reminded her of the colonies hidden away within the depths of the sea, from the very few of them that she had ever come across. They were attractive, with clear brown skin and streaks of dust on their cheek. The muttering wasn’t directed to Gem, at least she hoped not, it seemed to be directed towards the glowing green stone that was lying quite ominously on the gray dirt of the patio for the cafe. It gave off something that made Gem feel cold while under the sun that never seemed to stop beating down on the survivors of the war that ended everything. If that rock looked like a person you would never look them in the eyes, that’s what it felt like.

Gem had never been a great judge of people, as evidenced by how she decided to vote for one of the guys that decided that they wanted to team up with one of the superpowers, one of the ones that started it all, just because she had thought that he seemed like a nice guy. She had once been suspicious of a boy in her physics class but it had only turned out that he had a crush on her. She had been coming up with all of these scenarios where he was a spy that was going to recruit a member of her class. How was she supposed to know that wearing all black and being scary good at science was just who he was? Maybe she should just leave it up to someone else, her ex-girlfriend had claimed to be a psychic who could tell a lot about people by their aura’s, maybe she had known that Gem was a poor judge of character from the moment that they met so decided she was an easy target. That might explain a lot about how their relationship went down.

The stranger leaned down, their robes fanned out beneath them elegantly when they crouched close to the ground like that. Their wrapped hair blocked Gem’s view as they pocketed the green object. They started to move away. Gem felt a connection with this person even though they hadn’t spoken a word to each other.

“What was that?” It wasn’t the first question that she wanted to ask the stranger but it was probably the least invasive on her mind. She wanted to ask everything, who were they? where did they come from? Why had they talked to the green stone?

“It’s really none of your business, little girl.” The stranger said, eyeing Gem up like she was unpleasant to look at.

“I’m not that young. I was only asking, you don’t need to be rude about it, and it did hit me on the hand. That sort of made it my business.” The stranger’s eyes widened slightly, they didn’t seem the type to emote casually, something must have been wrong. “If that rock thing is dangerous I probably need to know whether to chop my hand off now or later.”

“Don’t do that, it’s unnecessary, you might die either way.”

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