Page 65 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

“I’m going to get her back. I’m going to get them all back.”

“I believe you,” said Polychrome. She looked around. “We’re not getting anywhere. Got any clever ideas?”

“We could call for a taxi.”

“Genius,” said Polychrome. She paused before saying, “You were always smarter than you thought you were. Even when we were kids, I knew it would be your team someday, no matter what Marketing said. I guess I was jealous. I thought you’d leave me behind.”

“I would never have done that.”

“I know that now. We grew up. That makes a lot of things easier.” And some things harder.

Polychrome gave Velveteen another sidelong look. Some things so much harder.

Sometimes she felt like the greatest gap between her and the woman who had been her best friend for so very long was experience. While Velma had been running from her powers and her past, Polychrome—then Sparkle Bright—had been turning into a professional superhero. She’d taken the advanced classes. She’d learned the tips and tricks and warning signs that Velveteen had never been able to study.

This, all of this, was a test. There were chapters in her textbooks about situations like this one, and it fit every requirement of a test. They’d lost one person for each phase. Victory Anna in their world, Action Dude in the mirror-world, and Jack Claus here, in this shapeless plain. Polychrome didn’t need to be a genius to know that it was going to take a sacrifice for them to move on to the next level, whatever that was.

“Do you really think you’re going to be able to rewind the world?” she asked. “To get everything back the way it was before you went away?”

“I do,” said Velveteen. “There has to be a way, and Santa…he may not always tell us everything, but he doesn’t outright lie. Not even to me. He wouldn’t have sent us here if he hadn’t thought that this could fix things.”

“So those three years would, what? Not have happened? Or we’d remember everything, only we’d be back at the start?”

“I don’t know. I guess we have to get there to find out.”

Polychrome took a deep breath. “I have an idea about that,” she said. “Remember how I used to fly with you when we were kids?”

“Yeah,” said Velveteen. “We were smaller then.”

“Relative sizes have stayed about the same. What do you say? Let me give you a boost?” Polychrome offered what she hoped was an impish smile. She didn’t want Velveteen to realize what she was doing.

There was a pause before Velveteen shrugged and said, “Why not? It’s not like we’re getting anywhere just walking.”

“Great,” said Polychrome.

It took them a few minutes to find a carry that would be comfortable for both of them. They wound up with Velveteen riding piggy-back on Polychrome, her legs locked around the taller woman’s waist, her arms slung around her shoulders. Polychrome gripped Velveteen’s wrists like she was a backpack.

“Hold tight,” she said, and launched herself into the colorless, spaceless sky on a trail of rainbow light.

* * *

Many people had asked themselves, over the years, just how high Polychrome could fly if she didn’t have to worry about silly little things like “running out of air.” Most of them would have had their questions answered if they had been present when she launched herself into the sky that had no borders, flying upward as fast and as hard as she could go.

After two miles straight up, her rainbow trail turned into an oscillating swirl of colors, melting into one another like an oil slick painted in the air.

Two miles after that, the colors vanished completely, replaced by a beam of pure, eye-searing whiteness. It was light without gradation, and it was as beautiful as it was alarming. Velveteen would have panicked, if she had been able to see it, but her eyes were squinted tightly shut against the rush of air, and she couldn’t see anything at all.

“You’re going to fix everything,” said Polychrome serenely. “I believe you. I believe in you. You’re going to fix it all.”

“What?” shouted Velveteen.

“I said, I’m sorry,” said Polychrome, and exploded into light.

It wasn’t a literal explosion: more the sudden conversion of all the nothingness around her into prismatic reality. Polychrome had created illusions before, but this was the largest, and the most complex that she had ever attempted. One instant, there was nothing; the next, Velveteen was tumbling onto a black and white floor, like a chessboard, like something out of a story, and she would have laughed at the sheer cliché of it all if she hadn’t been so damn scared.

“Poly?!” she shouted, slapping the floor like she thought she could somehow make it disappear again. “Yelena?!”

“There’s no rulebook to this place,” said an unfamiliar female voice. Velveteen whipped around to find herself looking at a dark-haired woman in a Grecian gown, with a spindle slung across her chest like the world’s most pointless fashion accessory. “Your friend, though, she remembered something from one of her lessons about ways this sort of terrain can be navigated, and she took a chance. We rewarded it.”