“Uh-huh,” said Velveteen.
“Global climate change, on the other hand, has been an unanticipated problem.”
Velveteen blinked. “Wait, what? Global climate change? You mean the thing the scientists argue about, and then the weather manipulators roll their eyes and go fix the latest drought because who the hell lets people go without fresh water just because it stopped raining?”
“How often do your weather manipulators change the weather to start a blizzard?” asked Aurora. “No one complains when the sleet stops falling, or when the rain is a warm shower intended to kick start a harvest. No one objects to the snow going away a little sooner. Maybe if we lived in a world without superheroes people would take it more seriously, and stop counting on some savior swooping in at the last moment to set the weather right again. But we don’t live in that world, and the system gets a little more broken every day.”
“Pretty sure that if we lived in a world without superheroes, there would be no Winter to complain about not getting as many snow days,” said Velveteen. “What are you intending to do about it? I mean, what is my part in all this supposed to be?”
“You’re the most powerful anima of your generation. You heard me say that before, didn’t you? There’s no one currently living who can hold a candle to what you do with the beating heart of the world. You’re the strongest life-bender there is.”
“I don’t know if you caught this, or if you were too busy chilling in your mountain and fucking with people who thought they were among friends and hence would not be transformed into living snow golems while they weren’t looking, but if I’m the most powerful, it’s because Supermodel spent decades having animuses killed as soon as they started to manifest,” said Velveteen. “I only got away with existing because I had that whole ‘must have a face’ limitation going for me, and she thought it would be interesting to see what I turned into.”
“Have you ever heard the theory that energy is neither created nor destroyed, merely transmuted into something new? She killed uncounted anima and animus, striking them down before they could mature into their powers. All that energy had to go somewhere. If she’d left them alone, you would have been the pretty little puppeteer they tried to convince you to become. But she didn’t do that. She killed them, and some of their strength flowed to you, as the next loch on the line. You’re not the only one to benefit from her wholesale slaughter of your kind. You’re the strongest we currently have.”
Velveteen stared at her, too sickened and surprised to speak. When she finally found her voice, it was to demand, “Does it work that way for all the power sets? Does everyone get stronger through killing children?” I have to kill her if she says yes. I have to kill her and then I have to kill myself, because no one can know this, ever. No one can ever, ever know. Most supervillains were good about leaving children out of their schemes. If they found out that killing child heroes might make their creations and clones stronger, that would change.
Everything would change.
“No, just for you,” said Aurora. “Most of the energy goes where it will. But life likes to cleave to life, which means it passes one to the other, for as long as it possibly can. Right now, you are the strongest. More, right now, the world knows your story: the brave, maligned heroine who rose from retirement to topple a corrupt regime before vanishing from the face of the world. You’re still a tragic figure to tell stories about. That won’t last much longer. The narrative is changing, and you’ll be a villain again soon enough. So we need to act now, while the story is on your side.”
“Wait, what?” asked Velveteen. “How long have I been here?” Time ran differently in the Winter. She knew that, she knew that, but she hadn’t really been thinking about it being longer than the span of a season.
“Long enough,” said Aurora. “Longer than you think. So here is the thing you need to do for Winter, before we can allow you to leave. There’s snow in your veins. There’s ice in your heart. They were put there with the very best intentions, and you’ve nurtured them all this time, feeding them on your own freeze. Now I want you to let them out.”
“I don’t—”
“Winter has given you life. Now give it back, and give us another hundred years of cold.” Aurora looked at Velveteen, and there was no love in her eyes: not now. The time for kindness and making nice had passed. Velveteen thought she preferred it this way. At least they weren’t pretending anymore. “Freeze the sky, and I will hand you to Persephone myself.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Yes, you do,” said Aurora. She stepped back, leaving Velveteen on the unsteady ground alone. “You always do.”
Velveteen looked over her shoulder to where the heroes of Winter waited. Jackie wasn’t with them. It would have been nice to have at least one person she could trust to catch her if she fell. Then, slowly, she turned back to the nothingness.
She knew from meeting Marionette, and from her own experiences with Tag and Supermodel, that the animating force she used to control her toys was less limited than she wanted it to be. It was too big. She needed to draw borders around it and clamp them down, lest she start breaking things she didn’t want to break. She also knew that here, in Winter, the snow was hers to command—at least while it was running through her veins. So she gathered her strength, pulling it in until it felt like her entire body had become one thrumming nerve, vibrating with the effort of keeping it all inside.
She closed her eyes, and stopped trying to hold on.
The cold burst out of her like a door slamming open, the snow that had been gathering in her veins for a full year—as the Calendar Country measured time—breaking free and swirling into the nothingness. Still, she kept forcing it out, and still, it kept flowing, filling up the world. Velveteen dropped to her knees, and for the first time in all those long and lonely months, the cold bit into her knees, chilling the flesh beneath her tights. And the cold kept coming.
The assembled heroes of Winter watched as the explosion of ice and snow and infinite cold splashed itself across the void, recreating, inch by inch and mile by snowcapped mile, the landscape that had been erased by time and the slow march of human narratives. All she was putting forth was cold, but that was all that was required for mountains, glaciers, even evergreen forests to unspool.
“She’s doing it,” whispered the Snow Queen, voice heavy with awe and wonder.
“Yes,” said Santa Claus, as he wondered—and not for the first time—whether Aurora’s insistence that they follow the old, painful ways had been born partially out of fear. She had insisted from the start that she wanted Velveteen for Winter, but sometimes what a person said and what they meant were very different things. With that much cold inside her, the girl could have challenged Aurora for her position eventually…and she could have won. “Yes, she is.”
I am going to miss her, thought Santa, as Velveteen drove her hands down into the snow and held on for dear life. She was gasping now, and the white was bleeding out of her skin into the ground, replaced by a healthy brown. But even that was paler than it should have been, like she was pouring more than just the cold into the Winter.
“Aurora, maybe that’s enough,” said Jack Frost. “She’s rebuilt half a sky.”
“She can give us more,” said Aurora. “She has it in her, and I want it.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” whispered Velveteen, and she pushed as hard as she could.
The last thing she heard before she slipped into unconsciousness was the beating of her own heart.
*
Persephone came from out the forest, and her footsteps left trails of snowdrops and crocuses behind her. The snow would cover them quickly, but their mere presence showed how close she was to the tipping point. Spring was calling her, and she had to answer, whether she wanted to or not.
“Is she ready?” she asked, when she was close enough to the group to speak without raising her voice. Persephone had never been one for shouting, outside of her o
wn home.
“Here,” said Santa Claus, gesturing toward the sleigh where Velveteen, exhausted and human, lay curled in a bed of furs. The reindeer attached to the sleigh’s reins pawed at the ground and snorted, sending warm clouds of breath into the air. “We wore her out, I’m afraid.”
“Spring will be kinder,” said Persephone. She climbed onto the driver’s seat, flicked the reins once, and was away.
Velveteen never woke.
The Princess scowled at her reflection. Her reflection scowled back. The brightly colored birds that were in the process of arranging her hair in a complicated chignon—she thought they might be lorikeets, which made sense; lorikeets were the best at really elaborate braids—didn’t scowl. Their beaks weren’t made for it, and besides, they had other things on their minds, like making her presentable before she had to face her public.
“I know y’all have only my best interests at heart, and I know you’d never do anything that I wasn’t comfortable with, which is how I know that those are rhinestones you’re tucking into my curls, and not actual diamonds,” she said, her voice as sweet and deadly as rhododendron honey. “I have to look humble and like I appreciate my station, and that means not accessorizing with more money than some families see in a year.”
One of the birds stopped braiding long enough to chirp something apologetic, before it returned to hairdressing. The Princess sighed.
“I know rhinestones never look as good in the photographs; that isn’t the point,” she said. But she didn’t tell the birds to stop, because really, looking good in the photographs was the point. Even if it meant wearing so many jewels that she felt like she was about to be the target of a complicated heist. Even if it meant putting on the sort of undergarments that pushed her boobs up until they became a virtual shelf.
Even if it meant spending a perfectly good afternoon—one that could have been spent on visiting children who needed a moment of her attention, or fighting crime, or hell, just watching television away from the public eye—answering questions for a bunch of vultures who wanted nothing more than to see her fail. The media conglomerate that paid for her insurance and kept her away from organizations like The Super Patriots, Inc. was generally happy to let her do whatever she liked with her time, especially since her powers came with their very own innate morality clause. But occasionally they asked her to step up and face the press, and when that happened, she didn’t really have any other options.
A raccoon slunk shyly forward, holding a tube of lipstick in each paw. The Princess looked thoughtfully between them before picking the slightly darker shade. It was still more “rose petals at dawn” than “blood of my enemies,” but every little bit helped.
“All right, darlings: thank you for all your efforts. I’m as pretty as I’m going to get.” Pretty enough to stop a heart, if she used it right. The Princess gave her reflection one last lingering look before she stood and turned away from her mirror. This was the life she had always wanted, the life she had dreamed about and wished for on every star. If she had to pay the piper every once in a while, well.
There were worse prices to be paid. Carrabelle Miller took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and marched off to face her public.
*
Since its founding, The Super Patriots, Inc. has managed to control a dominant share of the world’s superhumans, largely through control of the legislature and active recruitment of individuals too young to be licensed heroes without a corporate sponsor. Those individuals not under the control of The Super Patriots, Inc. have traditionally been branded as supervillains, save in the rare cases where doing so would have been too difficult to be profitable.
Consider the case of Michael “Flying Good Guy Man” Ward of Columbus, Ohio. Exposed at a young age to the same radioactive maple syrup as was responsible for such heroes as Majesty and Action Dude, and such committed villains as Property Damage and Boom Boom Pow, Michael was exactly the same sort of individual who was usually sought out by the company as an asset. Michael had also been born with Down’s syndrome. The company neither extended an offer of support for his parents, or an offer of employment for Michael, who went on to become a beloved hero in his local community, receiving his license directly from the state at the age of sixteen. He flew, fought, and served the public good, all without The Super Patriots, Inc. guiding his steps. While the company never admitted their mistake, they did become more flexible regarding disability among their recruits.
Consider also the case of Sandy “Maid on the Shore” O’Neil, whose powers activated while she was sailing off the coast of Florida with the rest of her graduating class. There were no fatalities, but the entire vessel was swamped, and Sandy herself was marooned on a small island of her own creation. Such powerful local area manipulation should have made her a perfect candidate for recruitment, had it not been for the fact that Sandy’s powers had been discovered when she saw the boy who had assaulted her the week before prom come up onto the deck. He had been allowed on the trip by teachers who thought he deserved to enjoy graduation as much as anyone else—as much as the girl he had hurt. The Super Patriots, Inc. looked at Sandy’s case and decided that she was too “controversial.” She has been on that island ever since. Any boat which comes too close is gently nudged away. She seems happy enough; there is really no way for us to know.
And finally, there is the Princess.
Born Scott Miller, the child who would become the Princess showed no signs of super powers until the day when the Miller family visited a popular theme park designed around a series of beloved fairy tales. The afternoon parade began as normal before transforming into the greatest spectacle of magic, wonder, and glitter the world had ever known. Scott—who had been going by the name “Carrabelle” since her eighth birthday, when she had finally gathered the courage to explain her true gender to her parents—was lifted by birds onto a float that had materialized out of confetti and pieces of the neighboring gardens. There was a large song and dance routine, which everyone in the park seemed to instinctively know by heart. Several animatronics came briefly to life and explained their positions on topics ranging from climate change to the state of social media today. It was an eye-catching spectacle.
It was understandable when The Super Patriots, Inc. showed up at the Miller house the next morning, offering a contract, offering pleasant threats coached as promises. It was perhaps even more understandable that young Carrabelle was already gone, taking refuge in the safe castles and safer lawyers of the corporation that owned the park where she had awakened. She understood fairy tales well enough to become their living embodiment: she had been watching for an evil queen or a wicked vizier since the first bird said her name.
Most of those who were not acquired by The Super Patriots, Inc. were passed over, for whatever reason. Carrabelle Miller was the one who had the sense to run away.
*
The doorway appeared first. Vines grew out of the seemingly solid floor, climbing up the wall until they formed an arch and burst into large, bell-shaped flowers in every color of the rainbow. The flowers began to trumpet, and more vines burst forth, lacing quickly together until the arch contained a door. For a crowning touch, a red-capped mushroom sprouted where the doorknob should have been. The flowers stopped trumpeting. The mushroom turned, and the Princess stepped through into the courtyard that had been reserved for the press corps.
For a moment, no one spoke. That was understandable. The Princess would have been a beautiful woman in jeans and a sweatshirt—in fact, she frequently was a beautiful woman in jeans and a sweatshirt, since she didn’t see any point in dressing up for the birds. But this was one of her contractually obligated press conferences, and she had pulled out all the stops. She liked her corporate sponsors, she genuinely did. That didn’t mean she wanted to be summoned to a meeting about how she was disappointing them by not keeping up her side of the bargain.
When you make a wish, you pay the price. Carrabelle Miller had known that at a far younger age
than most children. She was happy to keep paying all her life, as long as she never had to give her wish away.
Her dress was platinum and dark blue, technically, with a scattering of what looked like diamonds but were probably rhinestones, no really, across the bodice and the long, sheer cape that descended from her shoulders to trail behind her. And that was all well and good; that was what would come through in the pictures. It was a beautiful dress. A smaller version was probably already in production for the company’s official Superheroine Princess doll line. But in person, it was nothing so simple. It was the color of midnight and moonlight, the color of running down the palace steps barefoot, with all the weight of the story crashing down behind you. It was the color of wishes made from high towers, and of wishing stars glittering in a cloudless sky. It was perfect, and as she walked across the small courtyard to the podium, it genuinely stole the breath from the assembled reporters.
The Princess rested her gloved hands gently atop the podium, turning her head so that the sunlight filtering down through the evergreens planted around the courtyard would glitter off the diamonds in her hair. Her tiara didn’t need the help: it always caught the light, no matter where she was standing. Some of the reporters remembered that they had jobs to do and began snapping pictures. The Princess held her position. She knew what she looked like. This courtyard was mostly used for perfect “fairy tale weddings,” surrounded as it was by trees and elegant hotel architecture. In the distance, the spires of the park’s central castle rose, centered behind her, like a reminder of who she was and what she could do.
Finally, the Princess judged that they had been taking her picture long enough. She smiled, leaning very slightly forward so that the podium’s in-built microphone would pick her up, and asked, in a conversational tone, “How y’all doing? I haven’t seen most of you since the last time we had this little get-together.”