Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(29)
And each shelf in each unit held things that clearly came from a different world. Antsy picked up a plush rabbit, knocking loose a cloud of dust, and almost dropped it as a new feeling swept over her, one she’d never gotten before, from anything.
It wasn’t lost. It knew exactly where its owner was, and it had no desire to be handled by anyone else. Antsy forced her fingers to stay locked in place, mostly because if she dropped it, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to pick it up again. It kept radiating the feeling that she was doing something wrong, that she had no right, no authority, no reason to be touching it in the first place. But she didn’t want to leave it on the floor to get kicked under a shelf and forgotten, and that was what would happen if she let go. She breathed in and out through her nose, trying to understand the frozen disdain coming off the stuffed bunny, and finally found what felt like an answer. The rabbit’s owner was dead, lost to the dust and the silence, but that owner was somehow still in the shop. The rabbit wasn’t lost, had never been truly lost, because its owner had always known exactly where it was.
Antsy shivered and put it back where she’d found it, looking at the rest of the shelf. The first few items were like the rabbit, a little worn and tattered, but well loved and used by the hands of their person. After that, things became more impersonal, more like icons of events than actual reminders of them. A small, tarnished brass trophy. A photo album she didn’t quite dare to touch. A stick of unburnt incense. It was very odd.
The last item on the shelf was a glass jar filled to the brim with human teeth. The ones at the bottom were small and white, children’s lost teeth, and the ones at the top were larger, worn and yellowed, like they’d come from the mouth of an adult. Antsy shuddered and turned her attention to the next shelf down.
It was the same story: small personal items fading into icons, teeth at the end. And the shelf beneath it, and the one beneath that, and all the shelves around her, hundreds of them stretching out into forever. She looked around, wide-eyed, trying to figure out what this section could possibly represent.
Her directions had included a shelf as well as a section. Suddenly direly afraid she didn’t want to know, she uncrumpled the note and began counting her way along the units toward the one she’d been sent to find. It was most of the way to the end of the row. The unit looked just like all the others, and then Antsy saw the shelf and stopped being able to catch her breath.
The first item was her backpack, the one she’d been carrying when she fell through the shop door, and how had it gotten here? It was covered by a thick layer of dust and had clearly been here for quite some time, and as she stared at it, she realized she couldn’t remember when she’d lost it. Next to it was a shoe, one of the ones she’d been wearing on that first day. It looked impossibly small, like it could never have encompassed her foot. Next to it was a coin from the first Door she’d actually gone through intentionally, the Door into Dejanira, and a little tuft of blue-purple fur. That should have pinged as being from a different world than the backpack and the shoe, but it felt like everything else around it, like it belonged where it was, a part of this set. She realized she couldn’t trust the shelves to be telling her the truth about where their contents had come from, and she worried her lip between her teeth for a moment before reaching out and brushing her fingertips against the coin.
It wasn’t lost; like the bunny, it was still tethered to its owner, and was precisely where it belonged. But it didn’t radiate rejection or the feeling she needed to take her hand away. Instead, it welcomed her touch like it was coming home, and when she closed her eyes, she saw the market, saw herself walking with Sákos, and the last two years had been so wild and strange that it wasn’t the sight of the human-sized feline that caused her to yank her hand away from the coin, shattering the memory that had been more like a movie, herself seen from the outside.
No, it wasn’t Sákos. It was the little girl next to him, the child.
She was still a child, she was, she was nine years old, but the girl in her vision was so impossibly small that it was like being told she’d gone from a sapling to a tree in just two years. Hand shaking, Antsy reached out and touched the coin again. There was no second vision. Almost frantic now, she grabbed for the next item on the shelf—a pencil with toothmarks deeply etched into the wood—and gasped when she saw herself again, taller than she’d been in the previous snapshot, but still obviously so much younger than she had looked in the mirror that morning. She pulled her hand away and looked at the rest of the shelf.
It was sparse compared to the shelves around it, no more than a quarter full, and every item recognizable. At the very end of the line was a small jar, like all the others, its base covered by a layer of tiny white teeth. All of them were baby teeth, and there were so many of them. Her adult teeth had always come in so quickly that she’d never really stopped to think about how fast she was losing them, but it had been very fast, hadn’t it? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a tooth to lose. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, feeling the now-familiar topography of her adult teeth. No, that part of her growing was done, even though it shouldn’t have been.
She should have noticed. If she’d somehow … if she was that much bigger than she should have been, if she had grown up in the span between seconds, she should have known about it. She reached for the jar, grabbing it like it would somehow give her the answers she so desperately desired.