“Why did you tell me if you thought I wouldn’t?” asked Jack.
Velveteen shrugged. “I figured you should have a choice, if there’s a chance you’re about to be wiped from existence.”
Jack smiled a little. “I wouldn’t be the selfless spirit of Christmas if I tried to tell you ‘no,’ but I’m not just saying ‘yes’ because of my nature,” she said. “I don’t want to take someone else’s life. There will always be Jacquelines. This world is supposed to have a Jackie.”
“Then lead the way,” said Velveteen.
Jack nodded and stepped off the porch, starting deeper into the village. Torrey followed. As before, Yelena hovered above the snow rather than trying to walk through it, but this time she floated next to her girlfriend, lighting up the air around them.
When Vel stepped off the porch, Aaron was by her side, his feet as firmly on the ground as her own.
She took his hand as they walked, and neither one of them said a word, and neither of them needed to.
*
Santa and the Snow Queen were waiting on the steps of the Hall of Mirrors. No one commented on the fact that Santa couldn’t possibly have beaten them there: this was his place, and he was capable of virtually anything.
Looking at the Snow Queen, Velveteen thought she looked even colder than usual. Her aristocratic features were set into a frozen mask of disdain, her chin raised as she looked down her nose at the warm-blooded heroes in front of her. Jack reddened and turned her face away, not meeting the Snow Queen’s eyes.
“Well?” Velveteen held fast to Aaron’s hand as she looked at Santa. “Now what?”
“Now you go inside,” he said. “There is a door. It’s not large, or flashy; it’s not easy to find, when you’re surrounded by so many more interesting things. But it’s there. Find it. Open it. Go through. What you’re looking for is on the other side.”
Velveteen stared. “Seriously? That’s it? ‘Go in there and find a door, and we won’t tell you what’s on the other side, but hey, good luck’? That’s bullshit. What are we looking for?”
“We don’t know,” said the Snow Queen. Her voice was a blizzard, and all of them shivered, even Jack, who was no longer cold enough to withstand her mother’s words. “We are Spirits of the Season, bound to this time, this place, and the door you seek is not available to us. We are not allowed to know such things.”
“What about Jack?” asked Yelena.
“The daughter of the Toymaker is not yet an archetype; she is idea as much as she is flesh, but she exists in your world alongside ours,” said the Snow Queen. “She may go where she will, and the consequences will be upon her.”
Jack laughed unsteadily. “Aren’t they always?” she asked, and looked to Velveteen. “Well? You’re the one leading this parade.”
“So let’s go,” said Velveteen.
The Snow Queen waved her hand. The doors of the Hall of Mirrors swung slowly open, revealing the glittering maze beyond. Aaron bore down harder on Vel’s hand. She paused, realizing that he had never been here before.
“It’s all right,” she murmured. “It’s just the versions of us that we might have been. They can’t hurt you if you don’t touch the mirrors.”
“Because that’s reassuring,” muttered Aaron. He didn’t let go of her hand, and she didn’t try to pull away. They seemed to be taking comfort from each other.
Yelena, watching this, smiled to herself. It had been too long since she’d seen them like this. Some things were always meant to be, even if they only happened at the end of the world.
Velveteen took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
She walked into the Hall of Mirrors with Aaron by her side. Yelena landed lightly next to Torrey, and they followed their friends through the door. Jack brought up the rear, glancing at her father’s face long enough to see his reassuring nod. She didn’t look at her mother at all.
The doors slammed shut behind her, blocking the group from view. Santa and the Snow Queen stayed where they were, silent, looking at anything but each other, while around them, the wind howled. A blizzard was kicking up. For once, it wasn’t clear which one of them was to blame. For once, it didn’t really matter.
The mirrors stretched out to infinity around them, recognizable as mirrors only while they were at a distance. As long as no one was standing directly in front of them, they reflected the hall around them, creating a fractal wonderland of light and shadow. As soon as a member of the group passed, however, the mirrors flickered to life, showing distorted reflections of the people they were not, but could have been, had things gone ever so slightly differently.
Velveteen walked past Marionettes in white and gray, past Roadkills in black leather and silver spikes, past a hundred variations of her bunny costume. Past versions of herself who were holding Action Dude’s hand, or Tag’s hand, or no one’s hand; past Velveteens with toddlers on their hips and older children standing nearby. Those children were just as fractal as their parents. Some wore costumes; some wore street clothes; some—and oh, those hurt her heart—wore the training uniforms of The Super Patriots, Inc. She did her best not to meet their eyes. She just kept walking.
Action Dude walked past mirrors that showed him married to Sparkle Bright, both of them smiling company-approved smiles, both of them with eyes that might as well have been painted on. He walked past mirrors that showed him married to Velveteen, both of them smiling honest smiles, if occasionally strained ones (and one that showed her in a white and gray uniform, which was a little weird, but she was still holding his hand, and they still looked happy). Sometimes his uniform changed, the “AD” on his chest replaced by a smaller “E” high on the right side. Sometimes there were children, in the mirrors he shared with Velveteen. He tried not to look at them. They hurt his heart.
Polychrome walked past mirrors that showed her in white, in black, in rainbows; alone, or with Velveteen, or once, with a woman who looked like Jack, only blue-skinned and wearing a leotard that would have made an ice skater blush. None of them showed her Victory Anna, and she tightened her grip on the hand of the woman she loved, reminded, once again, that they were never meant to be together. Somehow, the universe had given her two shots at the impossible, and she was never, never letting go.
Jack walked past Frostbites and Jackie Frosts and Snow Princesses, and she wept with every step she took, and her tears fell as trails of glitter, and there was nothing frozen about them. She had lost all the ice that had ever been in her, and some things, once lost, are impossible to regain. Some things are lost forever.
Victory Anna walked past mirrors that showed her nothing but herself, and wondered what all the fuss was about.
“Do we actually have a goal in mind, or are we simply enjoying our tour of all the mirrors in the damn world?” she asked pleasantly. “I inquire primarily because I did not bring any libations for this journey, and will eventually require a cup of tea, lest I murder you all for the crime of existing in my general vicinity when I do not have anything to drink.”
“You sure do know how to pick ‘em, Lena,” said Velveteen. She kept walking, eyes fixed resolutely forward. She knew better than to give the mirrors any power over her. “You heard Santa. We need to find the door. Once we find the door, we go through it, and we find out what comes next.”
“You’ll forgive me if I put little faith in an anthropomorphic personification rooted in a culture I have never fully been a part of.”
“So put your faith in me,” said Jack, looking over her shoulder at Victory Anna. “I’m your friend. You know I wouldn’t lie to you. If Papa says this door exists, then it exists.”
“Any idea what’s on the other side?” asked Action Dude. Somewhere between the front steps and the first mirror, he had started thinking of himself as his heroic ID again. It didn’t matter that he was still in street clothes. This was a job for a hero. This was a job for Action Dude. Not Aaron Frank, who was a nice guy, but who would honestly have been happ
y to just be left alone for a little while, especially now that Vel was speaking to him again. It was such a novel situation that he just wanted some time to enjoy it.
“Not a clue,” said Velveteen, and kept walking.
*
The existence of parallel realities—the multiverse, if you will—has led to the rise of several schools of philosophy. Some argue that the very existence of branching realities means that all choices are good choices: all choices are reflected somewhere, after all, in some parallel world. Because of this, morality is a social construct, intended to make this world, this reality as palatable as possible. It is not inherently good or evil. It simply is.
Those who have made an actual study of the multiverse dismiss this view as simplistic, and probably a sign that the person adhering to it just wants an excuse to be a supervillain. Not all possible choices can be reflected or, if they are, not all possible choices can be viewed when starting from our world. Every reality they have been able to find has had some points of commonality with our own. Even Victory Anna, currently viewed as unique within the multiverse, can be traced back to a time-travel accident in a world that would fit nicely into a cluster of neo-Victorian steampunk realities which endure even to the present day. Her uniqueness is a consequence of her world’s demise; in all the other parallels where she might have once been born, she has long since died of old age.
The greatest argument against a truly infinite accessible multiverse is the persistence of individuals. Conception, argue the scholars, is a matter of timing, a matter of luck, a race against a million other factors to even begin the long, slow process of gestation. So many pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage, unable to attach properly, unable to mature—and that accounts only for the wanted ones, the pregnancies that are somehow desired across the multiverse.
Finding a single world which contains a single cognate for a person known to exist in this reality should, in a truly infinite multiverse, be cause for global celebration. But we do not find a single cognate. We find worlds of cognates, reality after reality which matches our own in all but the smallest of details. Their points of deviation are frequently within the last century. Those worlds are more comprehensible than the steampunk worlds, the cyberpunk worlds, the worlds where the divergence happened hundreds of years ago, yet somehow resulted in the same familiar faces populating the stories we have access to.
The multiverse, it seems, has a plan. What that plan is, and whether it is being formed by an unthinking personification of the vastness of reality or by some group of heroes as far beyond our comprehension as our superhumans are to squirrels, we have no way of knowing. Perhaps that is the most terrifying aspect of what is, after all, a terrifying topic: we have no way of knowing.
If our branch of the multiverse exists for a reason, and not simply because this is the way reality organizes itself, we have no way of knowing what that reason is. We have no way of influencing the outcome. All we can do is hope that whatever it is, it will be kind.
*
They had been walking for a long time. Long enough for the reflections around them to grow more and more bizarre in comparison to their reality, showing scenes of mermaids and vampires and worlds where everyone dressed like Victory Anna, all gears and copper stitching and impractical little hats. Victory Anna had paused in front of one of those mirrors for almost a minute, hungrily drinking in the details of her friends and teammates dressed in what she considered appropriate clothing.
Other mirrors showed a blackened, blasted, empty world, the aftermath of some great and unspeakable catastrophe. All of them hurried past those reflections, not looking at them any longer than one necessary. One of the devastated worlds was empty except for a stuffed bear wearing a felt domino mask, and somehow that small reminder that there had been versions of them in all those felled worlds, versions of them who hadn’t been able to stop the apocalypse, just made things worse.
“Wow, Jack,” said Action Dude, after a particularly nasty world overgrown with mutated brambles had gone silently past. “How do you deal with all this?”
“Mostly I don’t,” she said. “I’m not the Snow Queen’s heir. I thawed too much to be a Snow Princess, and thawing at all meant I couldn’t be a Jackie Frost. The Snow Queen keeps the mirrors, and that means it’s never going to be my job. I’ve been here before. I had to walk from one end to the other in order to become Papa’s heir, because this is part of Winter, and someday it’s going to belong to me. But I’ll never have to be responsible for them. I’m glad.”
“Jackie was,” said Velveteen, not looking back at Jack or sideways at Action Dude. Her eyes remained fixed on the hallway ahead, searching, always searching for the door. “She brought me here when I needed to understand my place in the multiverse. She didn’t like the mirrors, but she understood them.”
“I guess it’s different for everybody,” said Jack uncomfortably.
Velveteen started to reply. Then she stopped dead, dragging Action Dude to a halt with her. The others stopped in turn, Victory Anna’s heels clacking against the floor in angry punctuation.
“Warning, please,” she said waspishly.
“Look. Do you see that?” Velveteen pointed to the nearest mirror. Like some of the others, it was reflecting the hall: they hadn’t reached it yet, and it had yet to summon up a parallel world for their amusement.
Unlike any of the others, its reflection of the hall showed a door on the opposite wall.
“The door,” said Polychrome. “Shit. I wasn’t sure it was real.”
“Papa doesn’t lie,” said Jack.
“Yeah, he does, but not about things like this,” said Velveteen. She started to reach for the mirror, and hesitated. “If it’s reflecting the door, does that mean it contains the door, or does that mean the door is on the opposite wall?”
“Ah, good,” said Victory Anna, stepping briskly forward. “A logic problem. Let us consider. Mirrors reflect: that is the nature of mirrors. But with each reflection, they lose fidelity. As I am the only one among us who will not actually trigger a window into another world by stepping in front of a looking glass, it would behoove you to stay where you are.”
“Got it,” said Velveteen. “Do your weird science thing.”
“My science is not weird,” said Victory Anna primly. “Improbable, perhaps. Arrogant, absolutely. But never weird. My science behaves with the appropriate poise and decorum at all times.” She continued walking until she was standing between the two mirrors in question.
She had no parallel selves to reflect; she had no other futures to explore. The mirrors rippled like they were trying to tune themselves to a new frequency before settling on a simple reflection. She smirked. “You see?” she said, looking back over her shoulder. “I defy their programming. Magic is just science with the safeties off, and everyone knows that safeties are why your hair isn’t currently on fire.”
Victory Anna turned her attention to the mirror with the door in its reflection, studying it for several moments before turning to look at the mirror on the opposite wall. Logic said that it should have been reflecting a reflection of a door, continuing the back-and-forth exchange of images that defined the hall of mirrors. Instead, it reflected her reflection, with no sign of a door.
“The door is in the mirror that reflects it,” she said, turning back to Velveteen. “Were it not, it would appear more than once. You may proceed to do whatever ridiculous thing you feel is appropriate.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence,” said Velveteen. She looked at Action Dude. “If you want to let go, now’s the time.”
“Nope,” he said. “I did that once. Worst decision I’ve ever made. I’m holding on from now on.”
Velveteen smiled a little and stepped through, Action Dude by her side. The world shattered into prisms of silver glitter around them, and was gone.
From the perspective of the three people still standing in the Hall, the two of them had disappeared completely. The mirror continued to
reflect nothing but Victory Anna. She touched the surface experimentally, and grimaced as her fingers found only unyielding glass.
“Small problem, I’m afraid,” she said. “This style of travel only works for those whose cognates live beyond the glass.”
“Maybe it’s just because you’re alone,” said Polychrome, and took her free hand, offering her girlfriend an earnest smile. “I’ll take you through.”
“As you say, my Pol—but try not to be too upset if it doesn’t work. I want you back again. That means not becoming distracted by my absence.”
“I won’t, because you won’t be absent. You’ll be right by my side. You’ll see.” This sincere proclamation made, Polychrome turned and stepped through the mirror, pulling Victory Anna with her…or trying to. As her wrist vanished into the mirror, her fingers slipped out of Victory Anna’s, suddenly too slippery and intangible to be held.
Victory Anna sighed heavily. “Sometimes genius and perception are terrible burdens to be borne,” she said, turning to Jack. “Well? Scurry through, winter-girl, and keep my beloved safe. Her friends as well, I suppose. I may not be currently well-inclined toward either one of them, but she is the dearest star in my sky, and they are important to her.”
“I’ll do whatever I can,” promised Jack, and stepped into the mirror, vanishing like the others.
Victory Anna sighed, looking around herself at the empty Hall before calmly, almost regally sinking down to sit on the floor. “One down,” she said, and there was no one there to argue.
*
“Daddy, catch me!” That was all the warning Epitome—golden boy of The Super Patriots, Inc., strongest man in North America, Hero Beat’s sexiest superhuman three years running—had before his seven-year-old launched herself off the balcony.
She was an incredibly good faller. She didn’t plummet; instead, she spread her arms, increasing her surface area, and dropped with all the grace and poise of an Olympic diver. He had a split second to admire her form before he realized two things in the same horrified moment: