Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(21)

“Children get bargains the rest of us can’t,” said Vineta. She sat down in one of the chairs, a fruit that looked like a turquoise mango in one hand. Producing a small pocketknife from inside her robe, she began to peel it.

“As you’ve probably managed to guess, Antsy, this is a junk shop,” she said. “We sell lost things here, and anything that’s lost winds up here, in our storeroom or the attic. We sort through it, we price it, and we shelve it, and then it sits until someone comes looking for it. On the rare occasions when one of the original owners shows up, we return their property, no questions asked, although if it’s sold before they come looking, there’s nothing to be done for them. And when a Door appears, if we have someone on staff who can open it, we go through and we go shopping.”

“How did you get all that money?”

“People lose money all the time,” said Hudson. “And money is interesting because it gets less valuable as it remains in circulation, but more valuable after it’s fallen out of circulation.”

Antsy looked confused.

Vineta flicked a bit of mango peel at Hudson. “She’s a child, birdbrain, don’t ask her to understand things she has no reason to know about yet! All the Doors connect places where there are people, and people are essentially the same everywhere that we can go. They can look very, very different, like Hudson here doesn’t look like you, and you don’t look like me, but they’re still people, and being people means they’re going to approach some things in similar ways. The Doors don’t tend to open on worlds where people eat children who aren’t related to them, for example.”

“Do worlds like that exist?” asked Antsy, horrified.

Vineta nodded. “They do, and we’ve had people from them pass through, when they ran away from something bad that was trying very hard to happen to them. But we’ve never seen a Door from here to there, and I’ve never heard of someone who ran away like that going back.”

“One of them did,” said Hudson. “Once he was old enough that he wasn’t at risk of the dinner table any longer, he opened a closet and there was his home on the other side, waiting for him like nothing had changed. And he looked so happy, I guess that was where he belonged after all. He was only sure he didn’t want to be eaten, not that eating people was a bad thing.”

Antsy didn’t like the sound of that. She pulled a sour face. “I don’t want to go anywhere like that,” she said. “But how do I go home?”

“Is that really what you want?” asked Vineta. “You ran away. Whatever you were running from, it’s still going to be there, and you were sure you needed to escape. Has something changed that makes you think you wouldn’t be in danger anymore if you went back?”

Antsy bit her lip and shook her head. She didn’t have the vocabulary to explain that what had changed was her memory of the moment, panic and certainty fading into misty re move with surprising speed. The mind is bad at holding on to terror, and while she knew she’d needed to run, she was no longer as afraid, or as confident that if she went back, Tyler would try again. Maybe he wouldn’t. Or maybe her mother would believe her after all. Now that she had a little distance and a little clarity, and a whole afternoon spent at an impossible market whirling in her head, she could see the flaws in Tyler’s logic.

Yes, her mother had believed him about things like touching plates or losing the remote control—all small, reasonable things for her to have done, and unreasonable things for him to have lied about. But “Tyler came into my room and touched me and I didn’t like it and I don’t want him to do it again” wasn’t a small thing, or a reasonable one. It was the sort of thing that could make her normally calm mother lose her cool completely.

She just had to be in a position to say it.

Vineta watched Antsy’s face as she puzzled through her own feelings, and finally she sighed. “Well, that’s as it may be, but even if you don’t want anything in this moment more than you want to leave us, you can’t.”

“I can’t?”

“I’m too old for the Doors, or too settled; they leave you alone once your roots dig deep enough, as if they can tell when you’re not meant to be a traveler any longer. It’s not just adulthood, although we think adulthood plays a role in things—adults tend to be more set in their ways, and more inclined to think before they take big risks—but stability. You, on the other hand … the Doors know you, Antoinette called Antsy. They know you, and they wanted you, or they would never have come for you in the first place.”

Antsy, who wasn’t sure how she felt about the idea of doors being able to want things or decide things, blinked slowly at her. “Why does that mean I can’t leave?”

“Because the Doors won’t open on the world you want unless they’ve decided to be done with you.” Vineta’s smile was almost sympathetic. “It’s all right. You’re safe here until that happens.”

Antsy bit her lip, eyes going wide and slowly horrified. Then she wailed, “But I don’t even know where here is!”

“This is the Shop Where the Lost Things Go,” said Vineta. She pronounced each word with a careful precision that made it clear she was saying the name of a thing and not just a sentence. “There’s a whole world outside, filled with lost things, and now it’s also filled with you.”