Act One, Scene Eighteen
Countess Greenrose looked out the window to see the train of cars finally pulling up, hacked off her hair again, put her hat back on at an appropriately jaunty angle, and gave the security man at the door the signal.
The door swept open, they pulled in, and Greenrose descended to meet them. The first was the Titanium Tyrant’s own armored car, from which stepped his wife’s youngest daughter. She was was the sort of meek and polite and rather worthless young woman who perpetually had to be rescued from being thrown out of windows, but Greenrose kissed her hand and welcomed her in anyway. Then her siblings were next in succession, in ascending order of seniority, killers cold and hot. She despised them both impartially, though she doubted either of them would bother to make themselves her enemy; no matter how much Julius looked down on her, killing her would go against his father’s wishes, and Lizzy had a funny way of looking at Greenrose like she didn’t even hate her.
After that there were all the counts and counts’ heirs and counts’ spares to greet, and by the time she was done with that her hair was starting to threaten to impale her hat and she excused herself to hack it off again.
The party, Catherine thought as she looked around, fruit juice in hand, looked canned. There was nothing obviously wrong with the celebration; tables had food on them, tables had drinks on them, there were pretty-looking trees and flowers and winding paths and ponds, and yet everything looked like the central case of a garden rather than anything with any originality or life to it. Catherine was hardly a garden expert, but she suspected Greenrose wasn’t actually much of a plant person for a plant person and had just hired some gardeners and told them, “Here, I want a garden to host supervillain parties in.”
Did she see anyone she knew? Not very many. By the time she was twelve most of the second-generation supervillains had sorted themselves into three camps, each maintaining an independent presence from the other two. There were the ones who were serious, sensible people, who listened to their parents, who wore suits, or if they were in formal supervillain wear they had costumes of sober grey and black and gold which included armor, and they had gravitated to Julius’s party. There were the ones who took nothing seriously, especially not their parents, and who wore whatever was fashionable unless they had to be in formal wear, when whatever they had would show more skin than anything a Continental cape who wasn’t bulletproof would ever wear. They were in her sister’s party. And then there had been the determined, hard-working people who had listened to what their parents said instead of what they meant and had built supervillain armor and super-monsters and always wore costumes and never used the names their parents had given them, and they were part of the party of Countess Ilderia and they were all dead or on the run. She’d always stood apart from the three, but there had never been a fourth party. It had never had a center.
Across the room she saw practically the only person even less reputable than she was, a bottle of brandy - odd, considering that all the drinks were in glasses - having mysteriously appeared in his hand.
“James!” He met her smile.
“Catherine. How’s it been?”
“Oh, fine,” she said. He was someone she could talk to. “So in your last email you were talking about Caesar and Pompey but you’ve got to recognize that they’re the second generation, not the first. Pompey is sending letters threatening the Senate before he’s thirty -”
He smiled an ironic smile that did not match his debating tone. “But there was a first generation, even if the first was Marius and not Caesar. There were people who looked beyond the stable world, and choreographed the dance their grandchildren would dance.”
“Livy says the Gracchi are the start of it, and if you go back before them nobody knows what was going on.”
“There was an age of peace and brotherhood, and then there was an age of ambition.” He shrugged.
“But it wasn’t a product of individuals. Individuals had been trying earlier. The right man will come along sooner or later if the right moment lasts long enough but without it -”
Arms grabbed her from behind. Catherine’s instinctive elbow-drive into the stomach of the grabber turned into laughter when she realized that James was laughing, and that she could faintly smell copper.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Mercy!”
She turned as best she could and hugged her friend back. James raised his bottle in salute and drifted off in the direction of his brother Alex, who was grazing on the canapés.
Catherine smiled at Mercy, stepping back to see her more clearly. “How’ve you been?”
Mercy raised a finger in a salute-wave to Catherine, a visored cap appearing on her head for a moment to emphasize the parody before disappearing again.
“Doing quite excellently, Cat.”
“Do that again.”
“What, this?” A fedora appeared, this time, and then vanished.
“You have powers now,” Catherine said in a jokingly accusatory voice.
“I do,” said Mercy, proffering Catherine a trilby, which she took dubiously, gazing at the brim.
“It’s real. I mean, I stole it, but it’s real.”
Catherine returned it to her friend. “You can teleport objects?”
“No, I have hammerspace powers,” said Mercy gleefully. It was the glee of someone who got to make an old joke to a new audience. “Anything under two pounds and a cubic foot goes into hammerspace, and comes out when I want it to.”
Catherine blinked. “That sounds astonishingly useful.”
“Oh, you have no idea.”
Catherine gave Mercy another look, this one more careful.
“You’re still wearing a purse.”
“It’s lavender! Do you have any idea how hard it is to pass up lavender? And do you have any idea how well it goes with this dress?”
Catherine paused. “You have some extremely useful three-pound object that can’t easily be split into multiple parts in there, don’t you.”
“Power core for the boiler armor, yeah. It does go well with the rest of the outfit, though.”
“It does,” said Catherine sedately. “I admit it.” She paused. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”
“What?”
“When did you get these powers?”
“During the war.”
“... And you never thought to tell me?” said Catherine.
“Force shields stop internet signals, remember?” Mercy shrugged, then grinned an impish grin. “Hey - how much did your grades drop during the information blackout?”
She glared at Mercy, trying to muster up her remaining reserves of offendedness. “I took that quarter off. Mental distress due to my entire family and everyone I knew being under threat of death. You could’ve told me afterwards.”
Mercy shrugged sheepishly. “I thought I had. So, what’ve you got? Powers-wise.”
Catherine was silent.
“Oh.” Mercy paused. “You’re sure?”
“I own a Durendal armor, if that counts?”
Mercy tilted her head in sympathy, and Catherine went on. “I’m pretty sure I’d know if I’d been shot at enough to be a survivor, altered reality enough to be a warper and you can tell I haven’t reinvented myself enough to be an idealist. I either have no power, no power yet, or maybe a power that does nothing. How do you know if you have a dud?”
“You mean, like, ‘being immune to sarin gas’ but nothing else? Dunno. I didn’t get any new senses when I got my powers, I just got the ability to use them the way you use anything else. Maybe you just haven’t been under enough pressure yet. How many people were trying to shoot you?”
Or I don’t have the gene. Catherine had been born almost ten months after the Tyrant was imprisoned, though anyone who mentioned that would, of course, be executed. “Very few. There was no training required, then?”
“Nope! Would’ve been hard to find someone to train me, after all. It isn’t like I’m a brick or a tinker. The only person I know of with a power at all similar to mine is some American mercenary. Banisher, I think, but he works by rituals and at a distance and with different rules, so…”
“So you’ve actually got a unique power. Impressive.”
“Yeah, even if it means Mom and I have got to keep Impatience from shooting herself to get it, too. So -” Mercy saw the look on her friend’s face “- any plans for what to do next?”
‘Try to avoid being the next Count of the Fifth,” she said.
Mercy laughed. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”
“Thanks, I suppose.”
“All right, fine. I’m headed to the dancing. Want to come with?”
- - -
“Alex, what are you doing here?” James hissed.
“Drinking,” his brother said cheerfully.
Jay pressed two fingers to his temple.
“Father knows about Jackie.”
“He’s never minded about any of my girlfriends before.”
“You didn’t buy them rings.”
“Oh, shit,” said Alex.
“Let me tick off the words he’s said: Your name. Her name. Death threats. Profanity. And the usual comments about ingratitude and the best part of his life. Not much else.”
“Oh, shit.”
“You still have the fake IDs I gave you?”
“Best birthday present ever.”
“Get Jackie, get to the airport, get to America. In five years you come back; if you two break up, tell him he was right -”
“We’re not going to break up.”
“Then in five years you placate him with cute grandkids and he sees how adorable they are and forgives you because his temper’s cooled. You can hit up your mother, right?”
“She’s in prison.”
“What, still?”
“No, again. I could visit your mother?”
“... Probably not,” he said. “She doesn’t know you.”
“True.”
There was a brief pause.
“Thank you, Jay.”
“Don’t mention it.”
- - -
“Princess?”
Catherine didn’t recognize the man in Greenrose’s livery, but she recognized the livery, so she followed him up the stairs.
The room was paneled in green velvet, the color of Greenrose’s arms; silent, plain, sober. The desk that usually occupied it was shoved to the other side. Her living siblings were already there. So was Greenrose, looking at her with... pity?
“I suggest you sit down, Your Highness.” Catherine slipped into the last chair.”
“I’m sorry to tell you this,” she said. “But I just got a call from the hospital.”
The inevitability of it struck her, and she missed the next sentence, only coming back to it when she heard the words she knew were coming.
“... your mother is dead.”