Velveteen vs. The Seasons

by Seanan McGuire

  Polychrome managed to pull up before she overshot the window, trading her semi-controlled descent for a much less stressful hover. The air around her sparkled with sprays of pink and gold, the colors brought on by her exhaustion. She wiped the moisture from her eyes before focusing on the window.

  The shutters were open wide enough to allow the mechanical bats to pass through; no wider. Whoever had calibrated the little machines had been making them to an exacting standard. Carefully, she reached out and tested the shutter. It swung toward her when she tugged. Good. People who couldn’t fly often didn’t consider the need to actually lock their windows, considering them secure by sheer virtue of height above the ground.

  Moving slow and easy, Polychrome worked the shutters open wide enough for her to slip through, and slid into the darkness beyond.

  The room on the other side of the shutters was small and empty, the sort of featureless expanse of real estate that she had encountered in a hundred urban lairs, the sort where you didn’t expect to get your security deposit back, but you couldn’t afford anything nicer. She had looked at a few extremely similar apartments during her brief spate of house-hunting after leaving The Super Patriots, Inc., before Torrey had told her to stop being a bloody fool and just move in.

  Maybe they had rushed things a bit. Maybe they had gone from “first kiss” to “living together” too fast. Maybe there were moments they should have savored, things they could have lingered over and enjoyed more if they had taken them slow. But in the end, they’d both been willing to sacrifice a little maybe for a whole lot of definitely. She was definitely waking up each morning with the woman she loved; she was definitely happy. That was all that mattered.

  One nice thing about being able to fly: if there were pressure plates or tripwires at floor level, she didn’t need to worry about them. Polychrome hovered across the room to the open door, peeking out into the hallway on the other side. The lights were out, which made her faint natural glow a disadvantage: she dimmed it down as much as she could without losing the light that lifted her, and moved into the hall.

  There was one source of light that wasn’t her, seeping around the base of a closed door. Polychrome floated closer, pressing her ear against the wood. Someone was typing on the other side, their keystrokes loud enough to indicate that they were using outdated equipment. She clenched her left hand into a fist, summoning as much solid light as she could, and turned the knob, pushing the door gently inward.

  A slim silhouette appeared, black against the glow of a computer monitor the size of a wide-screen TV. The person sitting in front of the computer was typing madly, hands flashing back and forth across three keyboards. Wires extended from the person’s temples into the guts of the machine. Polychrome hung where she was, trying to decide on her next course of action. Punching, she was good at. Punching, she had been prepared for all her life. Stealth and secrecy weren’t things the company had ever wanted from her—while black light was essentially shadow, allowing her to move unseen through any dark environment, she had been their showpiece girl, always dressed in white, symbolizing their bright future for mankind. Put into a position where she needed to choose between hitting and keeping quiet, all her training said to start swinging. Somehow, in this situation, it seemed…wrong.

  “You can come in,” said the typist. They had a light, high voice. A teenager’s voice. Polychrome still wasn’t sure whether she was talking to a boy or a girl, but she was sure that whoever it was, they were under eighteen. “I knew you’d show up eventually. Which one are you, anyway? The Princess? Jack O’Lope? Uncertainty?”

  “Polychrome,” said Poly, finally letting her feet touch the ground. She allowed her natural glow to brighten at the same time, until it filled the room. “You’re going to have to come with me.”

  “Did you know that they actually let superhumans join the police force in Hong Kong?” The typist kept typing. “It’s probably way easier on everybody when the heroes can just say ‘you’re under arrest’ without worrying about getting sued later for acting under false pretenses. You’re not the cops. You have no actual civic authority. Technically, I think you’re trespassing right now.”

  “Portland has an exception for registered heroes in pursuit of criminal activity,” said Polychrome, her cheeks flushing blue with embarrassment. She hated this part of the job. Where were the defiant shouts and exploding light fixtures when she needed them? “I can’t be trespassing. You used robot bats to rob the city.”

  “It’s amazing what they’ll use to take our rights away, isn’t it?” The typist kept typing.

  Polychrome frowned. “Stop that,” she said. “You’re being detained because you committed a crime. Stop doing whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “I’m updating my social media feeds so that nobody worries about me,” said the typist. “If I don’t post at least once an hour, people tend to freak out. And no, my friends don’t know that I’m an extra-legal superhuman. I’m telling them that one of my cousins had a medical emergency, so I need to go offline for a few days. Internet people are like cats. They can be super-needy sometimes, but mostly, if you go away long enough, they’ll get on with their lives. And they’ll be happy to see you when you get back. In my case I figure that’ll be what, five to ten? Unless the government decides to draft me. Have you read some of the bills they’ve been passing lately?”

  “I’ve been busy,” said Polychrome. That wasn’t entirely true. She’d read most of the superhuman control legislation, the things proposed by frightened senators who wanted to protect their larger “normal” constituencies; the somehow more terrifying things proposed by politicians who were virtually salivating at the idea of living weapons who carried no development cost, who would do as they were told and make “friendly fire” a thing of the past. She just didn’t like to think about the picture those people were painting of the future—a future she would have to live with.

  “Maybe you should be a little less busy, before you’re a lot more drafted,” said the typist, taking their hands away from the keyboard and removing the wires from their temples before turning the chair around, revealing themself as a skinny, flannel-clad teenager whose gender was no more clear—and no more relevant—than it had been a moment before. “They’re only leaving you alone because you’re a symbol of the old way of doing things, and because your girlfriend is loco. You know that, right? Ditch the crazy girl and see how fast they snap you up.”

  “Victory Anna is from a different timeline; she’s perfectly sane for the world where she originated.”

  “Oh, I know,” said the typist. “She’s also smart, funny, easy on the eyes, and a talented technopath. I was honestly hoping she’d be the one who followed my bats. I figured there was a good chance she would listen to me. You’re just a corporate shill who got out. You’ll go crawling back.” The teen stood, holding out their hands, wrists together. “Cuff me. I’m bored.”

  “I’m not a corporate shill,” protested Polychrome, even as she sketched a figure eight in the air with one finger. A loop of light appeared around the typist’s wrists, binding them together. “I have a job to do and I do it. That’s all.”

  “You’ll have to pick a side sooner or later,” said the typist. “Do yourself a favor. Tonight, when you get home, look up a bill called ‘Animus Regulation and Control.’ I think you might be surprised.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The typist didn’t answer. The typist didn’t say another word as Polychrome called the police and waited for them to show up. When she handed the typist over, the teen was still silent. There was something unnerving about that. Polychrome couldn’t put her finger on exactly what…but the job was done, the crime was thwarted, and it was time to go home.

  *

  “Pol?” Torrey sounded sleepy. No wonder: it was almost three o’clock in the morning, long past time for all but the most passionately nocturnal supervillains to be in bed. She stood in the doorway of the office—once Velma
’s room, before she’d gone and run off to frolic in the Seasonal Lands, leaving her friends holding the bag—holding her dressing gown closed with one hand. No matter how much Victoria Cogsworth adapted to the modern age, there were some areas where she would always be an old-fashioned girl. Nightclothes fell into one of those areas, the one labeled “modesty” and outlined with little silver stars and copper hearts. “What are you still doing up? I’m cold. Come to bed.”

  “In a second.” Yelena’s eyes were glued to her computer monitor. She’d been reading for the past two hours, pulling up site after site, all funneled through Imagineer’s cunning anonymizer software. She hadn’t seen the technopath since they’d both left The Super Patriots, Inc. God, was Imagineer all right? They hadn’t been friends, but they had been teammates. How could she have allowed things to go this far?

  “That’s not a good tone,” said Torrey. She stepped into the office, walking barefoot across the carpet to place her hands on Yelena’s shoulders. “What are you reading?”

  “A piece of proposed legislation that would formally and fully define the ‘animus’ power set on a national level.” Yelena turned in her seat so that she was looking back at Torrey. “I like it here in Portland. The last two years have been a dream. You know that, right? I wouldn’t trade what we’ve had for anything in the world.”

  “All right, now you’re starting to frighten me,” said Torrey. “What does it say? You people, with your laws and rules about the gifts we get from the very gods themselves. Can any law of man bind what Vulcan grants to me? I say no, but the barristers and the judges contradict me whenever they may.”

  Yelena smiled a little, despite herself. “I love how you get all old-fashioned when you’re worried about me.” Her smile died. “I wish your gods existed in this world. We could really use the help.”

  “Pol…” Torrey frowned slowly. “Now you’re really starting to frighten me. What does it say that’s so terrible you’d wish to fill the heavens with gods your world rejected centuries ago? Because I truly don’t feel like being caught up in a holy war just because you would rather not put labels on things.”

  Yelena was quiet for a moment, gathering her thoughts. Finally, she said, “I wish Vel hadn’t gone to the Seasonal Lands when she did.”

  “From what I understand, she had no choice; her bargain had been made before the final battle, and she had to honor it.”

  “Yeah. I know. Jacqueline has explained it often enough. And Vel was tired, and it must have seemed pretty tempting, to have a little time to think. There was no way she could have known that Supermodel was still alive, or that they shared a power set—or how many terrible things Supermodel had used that power set to do.” The atrocities committed by the CEO of The Super Patriots, Inc. seemed to be without number. Supermodel had been a starving woman, and the world had been her banquet. “But with Supermodel dead, and Tag…whatever Tag is right now, Vel was the only animus we had. She was the only one who would have put a face on the power. And she’s gone. There’s nobody good for people to point to when they talk about a power that’s weird and scary and seems almost limitless.”

  “When I was a girl, there were some who wanted to use those of us who had been blessed with strange abilities in the formation of an empire,” said Torrey carefully. “They said that if we truly loved Britannia, if we truly wanted to serve our lady of the white horses, we would give ourselves over to the crown, and allow ourselves to be reforged into swords for our nation’s service.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I? Why, I said nothing, for I was scarce but nine years old, and none outside our walls knew what I could do with a hammer and a bit of wire. My father, on the other hand, marched in the city streets with others of our kind, shouting that it was unfair to conscript for no reason save the accident of birth. We had banned slavery within our borders. Were we to allow it again, all for the sake of calling lightning from the summer sky?”

  “Well, nobody’s marching for us now.” Yelena resisted the urge to turn back to her computer. The words on her screen wouldn’t have changed. “They passed the law requiring that all animuses register with the federal government last year. They presented it as a safety measure. Said ‘well, we only know of one, and she’s off playing around with Santa Claus, so it’s not like we’re inconveniencing a bunch of people.’ It was just a precaution.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Torrey. She began stroking Yelena’s hair, unsure of what else to do. “Registration, and then government service or submission to power blockers. I hope Jacqueline has informed Velma. I hope she can make an informed decision before she comes back—if she comes back. I wouldn’t.”

  It was suddenly difficult for Yelena to swallow. It felt like a vast knot had formed in her throat, blocking everything. Finally, she managed to say, “You know that broad power sets are defined by pieces of paper, and not by people.”

  “Well, yes. To do it any other way would be to admit that no two people have the exact same gifts. Even those who have what you term the ‘flying brick’ capabilities show variance.”

  “So those pieces of paper, they can move things. Like when they shifted water-control into elementalism, instead of weather-control.” There were still heroes who blurred that line. Lake Pontchartrain, for example, who created not only lakes, but the weather patterns associated with them. “They can change what a power is called with the stroke of a pen.”

  Torrey went still. She was a smart girl: she was a genius. Sometimes people forgot that, looking at the way she carried herself, the way she dressed, and assuming that she was completely divorced from reality. That wasn’t true. She was separated from reality, sure, but she had visitation, and she was never going to leave it completely. Reality was where she kept all her things.

  “Ah,” she said, finally. “I see. Well, is it a done deal? Have the papers been signed, and the ink dried?”

  “They vote next week.”

  “What of the telepaths, the mind-readers, the empaths? Are they to be re-categorized as well, or is this pleasure to be reserved solely for those such as I?” Torrey’s voice was stiff and cold, the formal cadence of a daughter of the Eponean Empire. “When will they come for me?”

  “The psychic power sets are still classed that way, although there’s apparently some discussion of whether psychometry should be considered a psychic-animus hybrid, since it works mostly on the inanimate.” And wouldn’t all those psychometrists make wonderful government investigators? They could uncover terrorist plots with a touch of their bare fingers. Who wouldn’t want that kind of power? Who wouldn’t think that a little overreach was justified, when it might save lives? “Right now, it’s just the plant-manipulators and the technopaths.”

  “Just,” said Torrey bitterly. She removed her hand from Yelena’s shoulder. “I notice you failed to answer my second question, Pol. When shall they come for me? Should I already have started running?”

  “Once this goes into effect, all power classes under the ‘animus’ umbrella will have forty-eight hours to report to their nearest police station for intake and processing.” Yelena shoved her chair back, almost knocking it over as she stood and pulled Torrey into a hug. The shorter woman squeaked but didn’t process. Instead, she melted into her lover’s embrace. She was shaking. That, alone, made Yelena want to burn down the world.

  “They won’t come for you, because we won’t be here,” she whispered, and her voice was ice and diamonds and glittering light. She had started to glow brighter in her anger and her fear: now she was strobing through all the colors of visible light, unable to express her fury in anything short of a rainbow. These people, these people. How dare they? They had no right. They had no right to make these choices for other people, for people who had never done anything wrong, apart from being born.

  Torrey pulled back, looking at her uncertainly. “Do you understand what you’re saying, Yelena? Even when you left The Super Patriots, you were still fighting on the side of good. They�
�ve never called you a supervillain before. They’ve never besmirched your name that way, not in this world. I know you don’t like to be reminded about…before…”

  “You mean how you fell in love with another version of me, and I’m just your rebound girl?” asked Yelena. She made the question as light as she could, to cover the fact that it was completely serious. The unusual nature of their first meeting was an unavoidable part of their relationship. Sometimes she caught Torrey looking at her and frowning, puzzled, because she had done something that the other Yelena would never have done. Sometimes Torrey cried for no reason that she could understand, and Yelena knew that she had just reminded her of the other world, the other woman who called herself “Polychrome” and kissed those lips, ran her fingers through that hair. They were haunted, and while Yelena didn’t mind sharing her lover with another version of herself, sometimes their bed felt dismayingly crowded.

  “Yes,” said Torrey, with quiet candor. “My first Yelena hated being called a supervillain. She flinched every time a headline talked about how wicked she was, or presented her as a danger to herself and others. I never minded much. The distinctions you people use are very odd to me, and I don’t see why I should give them that sort of power. But it tore her up inside.”

  “I’m not her,” said Yelena.

  “No, you’re not, and I’m glad of it, because I wouldn’t have come to love you for you if you’d been identical. I would have had to leave if you’d been exactly the same as she was. It would have been the only way to be fair. But you’re close enough, Yelena—my Pol. You’re close enough, and I know that if we run, if we go underground, it will hurt you the way that it always hurt her. It will tear you up inside. I can’t do that to you.”