Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(20)

“Children often inspire that response in adults, even when they aren’t the same species,” said Vineta. “How old are you, girl?”

Antsy wanted to be taken seriously, and she thought Vineta might be so old that she didn’t have any idea how old children were anymore. They were younger than her, but so was everyone else in the world. So she stood up straighter, and took a deep breath to make herself seem taller and thicker in the middle, and said, “Nine.”

“Nine’s a fine age,” said Vineta. “You’re a small nine, too, which will help. Hopefully it lasts and we can get some good years off you before you’re on stock duty.”

Antsy blinked. “Stock duty? Years?”

“Small children are good at working the Doors. That one you found doesn’t open for me anymore at all, hasn’t in years, and neither will any of the others, but they know you well enough to let you through,” said Vineta. She turned her eyes to the baskets and began sorting through them as she spoke, lifting items out one by one and placing them on the table. “That will start to fade eventually. It fades for everyone, and that’s a good warning to have, because there’s a point past which it won’t be safe for you to go through any Door you open for yourself. Once someone else has opened a Door, you know where it goes, and you can come and go as you please, as you feel the need.”

Antsy’s head was starting to spin. “That’s not how doors work,” she protested.

Vineta paused, a jar of sunshine-yellow jam in one hand, and looked curiously at Antsy. “Really? You’re an expert on Doors, then, you know everything about them? So tell me, expert, how do Doors work? Because we’ve wanted to know that for years and years. How they work, and how they pick the people they’re going to steal away, and more, how they decide where they’re going to send them. Why, if we could use even one Door reliably, we could be richer than all the empires in the history of all the worlds there are.”

Antsy blinked slowly. “Doors open in one place and when you go through, you’re in another place. Like the door of my bedroom opens on the hallway, and when I go through, I’m either in the hallway or my bedroom. No other places.”

“She doesn’t know what’s happened,” said Hudson. “Think way, way back, before the continents shifted in their positions. You didn’t always know, either. Your first Door was a surprise to you.”

“It was certainly something,” said Vineta. “I just wish it had been a surprise a little sooner than it was. I was fifteen and running from the marriage my parents had negotiated for me, and I got less than a year before the Doors stopped working when I tried to open them. What I wouldn’t give to have been nine. You have such adventures ahead of you, child.”

“Years?” said Antsy again.

Vineta sighed. She put down the cluster of pink grapes she’d been holding and turned fully to Antsy, expression grave. “I’m going to make some guesses,” she said. “You seem clean and well fed and healthy, so you didn’t run away a long time ago. Someone loves you. Someone has been taking care of you. And then something bad happened. Something bad enough that you looked at all that love and all that care and decided that they weren’t enough to balance out the size of the bad thing. Am I close?”

Antsy bit her lip and nodded.

“All right. So you ran away from home, and you were very, very sure you were doing the right thing, that the world would be better somehow if you could just get lost and disappear like a snowflake in a storm. And then you found a door that said to be sure, and you were sure, you were already sure, you were so sure that when you tried the knob, it wasn’t locked, and you could walk right through.”

She paused then, creating a silence that lingered until Antsy filled it with a whispered “My mother believed him because he was better than me, and believing me would have been believing a bad girl who told bad lies about good people.”

“I don’t think that’s true, Antsy,” said Vineta. “You’re a child. If an adult hurt you, that’s on them, not on you. Being bruised doesn’t make you bad, unless you’re a peach, and even a bruised peach is good for making jam.”

Antsy looked at her with narrowed eyes but couldn’t see any sign that she was lying, and felt a small knot that had formed inside her heart loosen and let go. Suddenly she could almost breathe again.

Vineta returned to unpacking the baskets. “Whatever bad thing this person did or was getting ready to do, it was bad enough you needed to get away from there. Maybe running away wasn’t the best choice you could have made, but it was the choice you chose, and the Doors respected it. I wish you were an expert, though.”

“She’s certainly a good bargainer,” said Hudson, head cocked, studying a slice of some sort of delicately scented fruit cake with one small black eye. “I’ve never seen anyone bring back so much on their first visit.”

“That’s true,” said Vineta. “I told you to buy whatever caught your interest. What made these things catch your interest?”

“The muffins and cookies and things smelled good,” said Antsy, haltingly. “And after that, I just bought whatever seemed pretty, or interesting, or not like anything at the stalls around it. The second basket was because there was so much market, and I’d gotten so much baked stuff that the first basket was almost all the way filled before we could even get started.”