Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(30)

Touching it was like sticking her finger into a live electrical socket. Static raced through her, painful and sharp and somehow cousin to the resistance she felt whenever she opened a door, and she saw. She saw two years of moments in an instant, two years that had somehow swallowed nine.

That time was lost. She dropped the jar of teeth back onto the shelf. It landed on its side and rolled, spraying tiny white teeth from its mouth in a shallow arc. She took a step back, hyperventilating, clutching her hand to her chest, and almost recoiled when it pressed against the slope of her breasts. She’d grown them at least a year ago, a process that had been swift and remarkably painful, resulting in waking up almost every morning with skin that felt like it had been yanked on in the night and aches in the muscle all the way down to her ribcage, and while they’d been annoying at first, she’d adjusted to their presence with remarkable speed.

Everything since she’d arrived here had happened with remarkable speed. It hurt to think too hard about that now.

Nothing comes free; ask them what it costs you.

Suddenly, it was obvious what it had cost her, although she wasn’t entirely sure how. She took a deep, shuddering breath, gaze dipping lower, to the shelf below the one that was so obviously hers.

It began with a small, withered bundle of dried flowers, and continued on from there, trinkets and artifacts from dozens of worlds, and at the end, the little jar of teeth, this one with only a few small baby teeth at the bottom and then so many adult teeth above it. Antsy chewed her lip as she cataloged the artifacts with her eyes, not quite daring to touch them. There was less dust on this shelf, like someone still came to clean it from time to time. Like it was remembered.

Those flowers, withered as they were, weren’t half as ancient as they should have been. She remembered the market where Vineta had bought them. Shoving the note that had started this whole thing into the depths of her pocket, Antsy put her hands over her face, and she cried.





PART IV

HOW TO GET FOUND





9

REVENGE OF THE LOST THINGS




EVENTUALLY, ANTSY’S TEARS RAN out, as tears will always do, and a bright new anger built under her ribs, growing and swelling like a poisonous flower until it felt like it would split her skin and leave her broken on the floor. She wiped her cheeks with the flats of her hands and went storming back the way she had come, only to find herself confronted with an endless maze of shelves, none of them familiar.

She hadn’t been so lost in the shop since the first days she was here, and she resented it. Planting her hands on her hips, she tilted her head toward the shadowy ceiling and demanded, “What do you want me to do? There’s no one else who could have left that note, so I know it was you who wanted me to find this place. Well, why? I didn’t know. I could have gone on not knowing for a long time.”

And she could have; that was the tragedy of it all. Maybe that seemed unreasonable, and it would have been if there’d been anyone around to compare herself to, or if her mother had been there to cluck her tongue and comment on how tall Antsy was getting, but alone and with nothing to measure against, Antsy had taken her rate of growth and maturation as perfectly reasonable, perfectly ordinary, the same things she would have experienced if she’d never run away from home. Now …

Now she felt violated, stolen from, robbed. She should have had a childhood, ice cream and matinees and sunshine and cookies, not working in a dusty shop while she grew up faster than she should have been able to, rocketing toward adulthood, spending hours she’d never be able to recover! She should have had time. It was hers, and she had never agreed to give it away.

“They were supposed to tell you,” said a voice from behind her. Antsy turned. There was a girl, as human as she was, except for the delicate moth’s wings of her eyelashes, the feathered antennae that rose from her forehead, and the tattered remains of actual wings that hung from her shoulders, too broken to ever have been used to fly. She was so small, so tiny and delicate, and Antsy realized she was thinking of the girl as an impossibly young child when she looked like she was the same age Antsy was actually supposed to be.

It stung.

“I didn’t know, when I made this place,” said the girl, walking to one of the longer shelves, shadowed and choked in dust and cobwebs. She reached into its depths, and her hand passed straight through those cobwebs, not disturbing them in the least. Antsy realized she could see through the girl, just a little, just enough to make it clear that she wasn’t really here. Not the way Antsy was.

As if hearing that realization, the girl glanced back at Antsy, a wry smile on her half-visible face, even as she pulled a small black notebook out of the recesses of the shelf. “I really didn’t. I’d been running away from home—I had a very good reason to be running—and I found a door that dumped me into a tiny little wooden room. It’s your bedroom now. The rest of the shop came later. When I opened the door and looked outside, it was junk in piles as far as the eye could see, with doors jammed in them at random. I opened one, thinking it would take me home, and saw a whole new world. It was…” She paused, bracing herself, and took a deep breath before she said, “It was magical. It was everything I’d ever wanted, and I never, ever wanted to go home.”

“Why did you run away?”

“It was … it was bad.” The girl turned back to Antsy. “I had two sisters before me, and both of them died before they were grown, and no one would ever say why, only that they were gone from me. And then my first mother bore my father a son, a strong boy, and everyone said he would live, and I guess that was all he’d been waiting to hear. He started hitting me that same night. He broke my wings, so badly they never straightened again, and I would never be able to fly upon my own majority. I would have no husband or household of my own, and still he didn’t stop, and still my mothers didn’t defend me. I knew if I stayed, I would die.” She looked at Antsy with wise, weary eyes. “You must have known something similar, to find my door.”