Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(28)
The feeling that she’d forgotten something was still there, pressing down on her, making it difficult to think about breakfast or doors or stocking or any of the other things that should have been occupying her mind by now. She stopped in the middle of her bedroom and turned a slow, deliberate circle, allowing her thoughts to go blurry and unfocused.
The feeling of something being forgotten was often a message from the shop itself, an attempt at communication by something essentially voiceless. She’d learned to listen, over the years. That seemed to be the key, the thing that made it all better. Listening.
Her eyes caught on something white under the dresser, down among the dust bunnies and the tiny feathers that Hudson sometimes lost during his infrequent molts. He’d done it four times since she’d come to the shop, and every time he was left unable to fly for weeks, petulant and unhelpful as he sulked on his perch. She usually swept up after a molt, but it wasn’t odd for her to miss a few bits of downy fluff.
Still, it was odd for a feather big enough to see to get for gotten. Antsy dropped to her knees. Maybe it was a sock. Lost socks were incredibly common in the shop and could appear virtually anywhere, not just in the stock rooms in the back. It was like there were so many that the shop couldn’t channel them all the way it was supposed to. They disappeared just as quickly, popping in and out of view as people found them in the ordinary way.
Two years, and Antsy still wasn’t entirely clear on the mechanism by which items could vanish on their own, called back to the place where they’d begun without the shortcut of shopping in a place filled with other things just like them, things that might be waiting for their owners to come and reclaim them. She’d learned to hear the hum of the shop telling her an item was safe to sell, that its owner had replaced it or forgotten it or otherwise moved on, and when she didn’t find it, she would offer something else instead, preserving the things that still might be come for like flies in amber.
Her questing fingers didn’t find a sock or a feather under the dresser. Instead, they brushed against a piece of paper. She pulled it out into the light, squinting at what was written there. She remembered it, vaguely, like it was something she’d read once in a dream.
Nothing comes free; ask them what it costs you.
The urge to put it back under the dresser was swift, and so heavy that she began the motion before she realized what was happening. Antsy scowled, balling her hand into a fist with the paper caught inside. “No,” she informed the ceiling. “I know you want this to be lost, and I don’t understand why, but I don’t care, either. You’re a store, you don’t get to tell me what to do.”
Then she stood, and the air was heavy around her, pressing down, like the store could absolutely tell her what to do if it wanted to, and she was being the unreasonable one by trying to say it couldn’t. Antsy brushed it off with the grace that came from long practice as she left the room and descended the stairs.
Hudson and Vineta weren’t up yet. Both of them were inclined to stay abed longer than she was, which Vineta blamed on having old bones and Hudson blamed, more frankly, on being a lazy bird. Antsy checked the paper again, making silent note of the shelf location written at the top, and began to walk.
It took a while. Near as she could tell, the shop was close to infinite, filled with aisles and tiny rooms that only existed when someone needed them. The door to the yard was on the other side of the employee area, and the yard itself was easily as large as the shop it was attached to. Antsy was normally careful not to go too deep, out of the genuine fear that if she did, she might not be able to find her way back without sending up a flare or starting a fire or something.
Hudson always seemed to know exactly where the things he was looking for were located. He had an innate sense of the shop’s geography and current stock levels that Antsy assumed was connected to this being his world of origin. He had started out here; of course he understood it, the way she assumed she would slide back into the world she’d left without missing a beat when she finally got to go home. You knew the place you came from.
But something told her that going back to fetch Hudson wouldn’t do her any good, that it wouldn’t find the thing she was looking for or make her search any easier. It was such an odd feeling that she focused on it as she walked past aisles filled with things she didn’t recognize, things made for use in worlds other than her own. Who could possibly have used a sword made of candy glass, so brittle it would shatter as soon as someone swung it, breaking without doing any real damage? Or a harp made of bones? That one was unsettling. Antsy shuddered and walked faster, leaving it behind, until she finally reached the section the note had indicated.
This space was … odd. The shelves were dusty, which didn’t happen in even the most underused parts of the shop; even when no one went there, the shop kept itself clean, within the limits of its ill-defined ability. They were as crowded with items as any other shelf she might have wanted to examine, but they didn’t seem to make any sense. They weren’t grouped by category, or by color, and even the assumption that they were sorted by world of origin didn’t survive glancing at more than one of the shelving units. Each shelf seemed to consist only of items from a single world, but each unit had at least six shelves, and since she was finally tall enough to reach the highest of them—which felt odd and utterly natural at the same time; she’d been the one who lived with all that growth, day by day, and so it should be perfectly reasonable for her to reach the top shelves.