Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(24)

“They know about the Doors where you come from?” was all she asked.

“Of course,” said the girl, sounding stung. “We’re a civilized world.”

Antsy didn’t like what that implied about her own world, and so she didn’t say anything else, just kept following Hudson until she heard something new from up ahead, something that sounded surprisingly like a dog barking. Hudson swooped around a corner. The two girls followed, and what they found there was a space that looked like a cross between the livestock barn at a state fair and an adoption event for an animal rescue. The shelves of books and knick-knacks were gone, and in their place were cages and tanks and tall habitats with multiple levels. Cats and rabbits, ferrets and rats, even dogs and foxes watched them with bright eyes. Birds rattled the bars of their cages, while snakes slithered and lizards skittered through the loam of their own tanks.

It was huge. It was impossible. It should have smelled like a barn and required daily cleaning, but somehow Antsy had never seen it before, never even suspected it might exist. It seemed ridiculous that she wouldn’t have been called to feed something at least once, or asked to pick up pet food during one of their shopping trips, but here they were, and there were all the animals, and they should have had an entire staff devoted to nothing but their care. They should have been noticeable.

The girl made a wordless sound of delight and scurried off to look at the cages and cages of cats while Antsy stood in open-mouthed amazement. Hudson swooped toward her. She put up her arm to give him a perch, a gesture that had become so habitual that it was almost instinct by this point. He settled, claws gripping tight, and preened himself for a moment before clacking his beak in satisfaction and looking at her face.

“Well?” he asked. “What’s wrong this time?”

“How is this here? I should have seen it by now. Vineta should be asking me to clean cages every day. And is that a unicorn?”

“It’s here because animals get lost sometimes, same as anything else, and you haven’t seen it because we didn’t need it, and so we lost track of it.”

That seemed awfully convenient, and Antsy was about to say so when a worse thought struck her. “Children get lost too,” she said. “Is there an orphanage in here somewhere?”

“No! That would be ridiculous.” Hudson fluffed out his feathers in annoyance. “Children get lost, but the only ones who wind up here are the ones like you, who the Doors already wanted to keep track of.”

The way Hudson and Vineta talked about the Doors, they were both alive and aware. They watched people without making themselves known, and they had opinions, and they wanted things. Why they wanted the things they did, or why some worlds knew about the doors while so many others didn’t, was less than clear, but all of them were somehow connected anyway. Antsy felt like there was a secret lurking just out of reach, and once she understood it, she would be able to go anywhere she wanted.

She would be able to go home. Even now, after seven months in this strange and ever-surprising place, she didn’t regret what she had done; Tyler had given her what felt like no choice, and she had made the decision that was best for her in that moment. But she also missed her mother, and felt like she’d done her a disservice by disappearing so abruptly. She would be missed. She knew that without question. So even tually, no matter how much this place came to feel like home, she would need to find a way to get back.

It was only a matter of knowing how.

“So not all children need Doors?” Sometimes she asked questions that Hudson and Vineta treated as absolutely obvious, things that didn’t really need asking, but it was the only way to get them to explain anything. Left to their own devices, they would say things that overturned everything she thought she knew about the way the world—any of the worlds—worked and then just walk away like it was nothing.

It wasn’t nothing. It was everything.

Hudson gave her what she had come to recognize as the avian equivalent of a pitying look and said, “No. Only the ones who aren’t made right for the worlds where they started out need Doors. All children may want them—who doesn’t want a grand adventure? But needing and wanting aren’t the same, and the Doors can see the difference. Some children need to escape from places that will only hurt them, or grind them away until they’re nothing. And some children need to go somewhere else if they’re ever going to grow into the people they were meant to be. The Doors choose carefully.”

“So I’m special?” The idea was appealing. Who didn’t want to be special?

So it was almost disappointing when Hudson ruffled his feathers and said, “Only as special as the kitten who gets picked first from a litter of twelve. It’s luck as much as anything. Our Door almost always looks like a door. If you hadn’t run away when you did, or if you hadn’t tried to use the door you did, you wouldn’t be here. The Doors have to choose you, but then you have to choose yourself. Luck and timing. Just looking for something lost doesn’t make you Lost yourself.”

The stranger girl was walking back toward them, a squirm ing ball of calico fur in her hands. “I found her!” she crowed, and held the kitten up for their approval. It squirmed in her hands, mewling and opening brown-feathered wings in frustrated feline protest.

Antsy blinked. Whatever world this girl came from, it was very different from her own. “Oh,” she said, after a brief pause to reorient herself. “Well, she’s lovely. Was that all you needed? You didn’t lose anything else?”