Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(27)
The next morning when she woke, her calves hurt. She had to rub them for almost a solid minute before she got out of bed, and they still felt odd as she walked to the bathroom and reached for her toothbrush. She was halfway through brushing her teeth when she realized the holes left by her baby teeth were gone; her adult teeth had finished growing overnight, and fit smoothly into her mouth. She bared her teeth at the mirror, studying her reflection, trying to see the shape of her adult smile in her reflection. It wasn’t quite there yet, but it felt like it was coming, like the bones of her face were rearranging themselves to prepare for the woman she was going to be. Antsy dropped her toothbrush back into its cup with a feeling of solemn satisfaction and scampered back to her room to check under her pillow.
The lost teeth were gone, replaced by two large chocolate coins and a note with a shelf location written in unfamiliar handwriting, and under that, a single sentence:
Nothing comes free; ask them what it costs you.
The note wasn’t signed. Antsy frowned and put it on the dresser while she turned to put on her clothes for the day, and the stirring of the air from pulling off her nightgown was enough to send the note tumbling behind the dresser, where she promptly forgot about it. Not in the casual way of forgetting things when they lack importance; no, this was a forgetting so profound that the thing forgotten might as well never have existed. She’d lost nothing. There had been nothing to lose.
The chocolate coins were still on her pillow. She snatched them as she ran out of the room, and she didn’t look back.
It wouldn’t be until a morning almost two years later, when all her remaining baby teeth had been bought and paid for with chocolate, and no more mysterious notes, that she would even remember that she’d lost something.
By that point, it would almost be too late.
8
WHAT WE LOSE ALONG THE WAY
ON THE MORNING WHEN Antsy woke feeling as if she’d forgotten something, she had been sleeping in the little room at the top of the shop for two years. Two years since she’d run away from home and stumbled through a door and found herself pressed into a job she was only just beginning to think she truly understood. Two years of strange new worlds almost every day—sometimes several times a day; her record was eleven, and that had left her not only frustrated by how little she’d been able to see of each world but also so exhausted and disoriented that she’d gone to bed and slept for almost an entire week, after which Hudson had put his talon down with Vineta and restricted her to a maximum of five Doors a day. Antsy had been grateful but sorry; the markets were her favorite part of the day, and their constant variety kept her from getting bored when so much time was spent on sorting and shelving.
She sometimes felt as if she was missing something, not attending a traditional school, but she could read and write well enough to enjoy the storybooks she sometimes found written in English, and a handful of words and phrases in a hundred other languages. She could make change in three dozen currencies, and carry a basket that weighed half as much as she did. She could even navigate the shop without help, and did so most days, spending the first part of her mornings hunting through the shelves for Doors that had appeared in the night. It had taken her most of the first year to learn that she should just make note of their locations and not attempt to open them; every turn of the knob unlocked another world, and she had lost many promising markets and tempting fields before she’d realized she should leave them alone while she fetched Vineta.
She had been seven going on eight when she found the Shop Where the Lost Things Go, and now she was nine going on ten. She had a very good sense of how long it had been, both thanks to the calendars she sometimes found on the shelves and her own accounting of the days. she knew how long she’d been here, and how long her mother had been waiting to see her again. Two years. One day she would find the Door that took her home. One day.
But until then, she had a job to do, and because she had been here so long, she didn’t find it entirely odd that she had grown during those two years. If there had been anyone around for her to compare herself to apart from Vineta, she might have realized something was wrong, but with only an ancient woman and a bird to measure herself against, it didn’t seem all that strange that she had gone from a perfectly reasonable four feet to almost five and a half feet in height over the course of just two years.
Some of the other changes had been more of a surprise. When she’d woken up with blood on her sheets, Vineta had sat her down for a halting, uncomfortable conversation about babies and the making of them, and how to handle cramping and cleaning up after herself. She’d finished that conversation with a critical look at the full length of Antsy, and a muttered “I thought we’d be doing this sooner, with you being nine when you first got here. But I suppose longer is better, in the main stretch of things.” And then she’d sent Antsy upstairs, restricted from her duties for the day.
There had been a basket of sanitary products in the bathroom that day, and an assortment of herbal teas in her bedroom, ready to be brewed, as well as a drawer filled with new underpants and several training bras that fastened at the back and relieved a pressure Antsy had barely noticed building in her chest. And since, again, she had no one to compare herself to, she hadn’t really noticed that other things were changing perhaps faster than they really should have.
The girl who left her room, paused, and turned to walk back inside, was almost three months shy of her tenth birthday, and she had the face and figure of a girl well past the age of sixteen, cruising through her teen years and cresting toward adulthood.