Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(31)

Antsy looked away, unable to face that searching gaze. “Similar enough,” she said. “He never hit me, but I don’t think he needed to.”

“No. They don’t, always.” The girl offered Antsy her notebook. “This is for you, now. They should have told you. They were supposed to tell you. That was what the doors and I agreed on, back in the beginning, when all this was new.”

“The Doors can talk?” The girl didn’t say the word the way Antsy had learned to, didn’t put the emphasis on it as a proper noun: she said “door” like it was a normal thing, a tool, and not some all-powerful force.

It sounded kinder.

“Not exactly, but they communicate, in their way, if you know how to listen.” She pressed the notebook into Antsy’s hands. “I built this place board by board to give the things I found a little dignity until their owners came back for them, and a place to rest if their owners never came. I wanted it to be safe here. For kids like me. And that wanting went into the walls, and they came, so many of you, over and over, and it broke my heart every time, even though I’m dead and gone and only lingering because I lost the right to be buried in the halls of my own people. And sometime along the way, the adults who had been lost children stopped telling the new arrivals the truth of the tolls. It was wrong. It was unfair. I had to figure it out on my own, but I was in an empty world, no shop, no system, no one telling me what to do or how to do it. It’s easy to go along with a system. It’s harder to create one. You have to choose it, over and over, when you’re building it. You should have been told. All of you should have been told.

“But I’m not here anymore. I’m as lost as you are. It’s hard for me to say anything, and it took me a long time and a lot of effort to send that note, and after I did, I had to sleep for a while, so I didn’t realize you’d lost it. The shop and I don’t always agree anymore. I’m gone and it’s still here, and it needs you, in a way that it no longer needs me.”

“What were they supposed to tell me?”

“It’s in the book,” said the girl, moth-winged eyelids drooping. She looked tired. She looked like she was aging in front of Antsy’s eyes, almost as tall as Antsy herself now, and Antsy realized she’d been talking to her as she was when she first got here, before she had … died, presumably, and now she was getting older, aging at a rapid clip. Her hair, colorless in its translucency, grew straight and stringy; her skin grew thin and seamed.

“What was your name?” asked Antsy, anxious to learn more before the girl—no, woman, now—before she disappeared, and Antsy was alone again.

“Elodina,” said the woman, and sighed. “I wish I could have flown. I wish you had been warned. I’m sorry.”

And then she was gone, but the notebook remained, and the feeling it radiated was not of loss, but of being found; this thing belonged to Antsy now.

Sitting down on the floor with her back against the nearest shelf, Antsy opened the tiny book and began to read.





10

IN A TIME OF MISTS AND MOTHS




THE TEXT WAS SMALL and slanting, and Antsy recognized the handwriting immediately as matching the note she’d found under her dresser. It seemed to swim in front of her eyes for a moment, translating itself from a language she didn’t know into easy English. Years without formal schooling had left her not quite as skilled a reader as she might have been, but she’d been old enough to be reading chapter books when she ran away, and so once she focused and concentrated, the words unsnarled themselves.

“Cyane is dead. Mother says it was an accident, but I am less than sure. She was a strong and clever flier; she knew the winds and how they would treat her under any safe condition, and she would not fly during a storm. But the babe is healthy and well, and Father says we are not to taint this time of joy with mourning. The babe will carry our family’s name into the future on broad and cunning wings, and we will not lose our place when our father’s time is done. We should all be grateful for his arrival. We should all be glad.

“But I am not grateful. I am not glad. My sister is dead. She will never brush my hair or bring me sugared fruits again. She will not sing to me at night, or praise me in the morning. My sister is dead, and no one will mourn her but me…”

The rest of the page was more of the same, the rambling grief of a little girl who had lost what mattered most to her in the world. Antsy recognized the emotions all too well; they had been her own, on that long-ago day when her father fell in the Target toy aisle.

She hadn’t thought about that day in years. She shuddered, as much out of shared sorrow for a girl she’d never known as from the shame of realizing how much she’d allowed to fade away into the misty halls of memory. Flipping ahead several pages, she skimmed the text, looking for the place where Elodina’s story began colliding with her own.

She found it about a quarter of the way in.

“My wings are broken such that they will not heal. Father says I am a burden to the family, as if he were not the one to have the breaking of them. Father says a daughter who cannot fly and cannot wed brings nothing to the halls of her family, carries no value, contains no future. He will not even consider me for the weavers or for the halls of education; I am a shame and a betrayal of his own virility. I should not have been born a girl. I should not have been made weak by the love of my mothers and sister. I should not have allowed myself to be swayed from my duty. But I did all those things, and now, for that crime, I am to die. There is no question in my heart but that he intends to kill me.