Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(23)
Only not so much, as it turned out. No matter how many Doors she opened—and she opened a lot of Doors, she opened so many Doors that even Vineta was impressed—they didn’t lead to anything she recognized as the world she’d come from, or even anything close to it. Worlds of talking porcelain dolls and worlds of dragons, a terrifying world filled with dinosaurs that roared and chased and sold no wares, making Vineta’s claim that all the Doors opened on places with people somewhat more confusing. Another world cast entirely in black and white, where even Hudson seemed like an offensive riot of color against the monochrome sky.
After six months of Doors, Antsy had been forced to admit that she was here until she wasn’t lost anymore, and so had started helping more properly with the daily operation of the shop, for the sake of earning her keep. Her keep, such as it was, seemed to be a nebulous sort of thing; both Hudson and Vineta would exclaim over how much she’d managed to buy and how good her instincts were every time she came back from a shopping trip, something that was only possible when she opened one of the Doors to get there … or so she thought.
She had been in her seventh month at the shop, standing behind the counter while Hudson showed her how to work the register, when a door that hadn’t been there a moment before swung open in the wall across from them. It should have knocked over several shelves. It didn’t. It should have been prevented from opening by the pile of broken lawn gnomes Vineta had placed against the wall, claiming they would be decorative. They weren’t, and it wasn’t. Instead, it opened, and a girl stepped into the shop, blinking rapidly as she tried to take in everything around her at the same time.
Antsy straightened, feeling very mature and jaded as she watched the girl approach the counter. She’d been that new and impressed once. She’d been that awed by everything around her.
She’d been a fool. “Can I help you?” she asked, once the girl was close enough.
“Oh, I hope so,” said the girl, and hurried to the counter, eyes bright and oddly inhuman. Her pupils were sideways ovals, like a goat’s, and not like a human’s pupils at all. “My mother said that if I turned around five times and hopped on one foot while I thought very, very hard about what I wanted to find, there would be a door behind the mirror, and so I did, and then there was, and now I’m here. I’ve lost my kitten. Mother says when things are lost, they always end up here, and I want my kitten to come home more than anything. Please, can you help me find her?”
Antsy, who hadn’t encountered anything like this before, looked hopelessly to Hudson. He ruffled his feathers the way he did when he was thinking—and wasn’t it funny, how normal that had become—and said, in a thoughtful tone of voice, “Kitten. It was alive when you lost it, yes? You’re not speaking of a metaphorical loss, the sort you grieve and learn from?”
“No,” said the girl firmly. “My brothers were running in and out of the house like wild things, even though they know it’s not allowed, and they left the front door open too long. And then, whoops and whist, my little Sparrow was gone, out into the big wide world, but alive as anything.”
Hudson bobbed his head. “All right, all right, a living lost thing, then. Antsy, have you seen the menagerie section yet?”
“No,” she replied, quietly confused. She’d seen all manner of things in her seven months at the shop, but nothing living apart from herself, Hudson, and Vineta.
“Then this is the thing you’ll learn today,” he said, sounding pleased with himself, and took off in a flurry of wings, flying in the slow, back-and-forth manner that always meant he was expecting her to follow. So she came around the side of the counter and trailed after him, the strange girl falling into step beside her.
The girl looked to be about the same age as her but, to Antsy’s surprise, was considerably shorter. Maybe people weren’t very tall in the world that she came from. She walked with quick, economical steps, and was wearing a simple cotton dress printed with flowers that Antsy didn’t recognize, almost like daisies but with too many petals and eyes where the centers should have been. As Antsy watched, one of those flowers blinked, and she managed, barely, not to flinch away.
“Do you work here?” asked the girl, all innocence and excitement.
“I … I live here,” said Antsy. The sentence was still unfamiliar in her mouth, like a new tooth too large for the space it had grown to fill. But like a new tooth, she knew, it would become familiar with time, until it was just a part of the shape of things, until she forgot what it was like to run her tongue over anything else.
That’s one of the things about living in a body. It can change, but the ways it changes today will be the ways it has always been tomorrow. If the modification isn’t noted in the moment, then it can be all too easily dismissed.
This will be important later. But it isn’t important now, and it wasn’t important then, as two girls and a bird moved deeper into the store.
“Oh, that must be wonderful,” said the girl. “My mother says this place is a nexus, and you can go almost anywhere from here. But I can only visit. I can’t stay.”
Antsy, who wasn’t sure how the girl thought she was going to go home again, frowned a little, and kept following the flicker of Hudson’s wings. They were passing aisles she’d never seen before, each one packed with shelves and racks of clothing, each shelf and rack groaning under the weight of everything they held. This place was an endless cavern of treasures, and she could explore for a hundred years without seeing the end of it.