Page 14 of In an Absent Dream

Could girls even grow feathers in the world outside the Market? If she took Moon home with her—grabbed her right now and ran for the door—would the feathers fall out, or would they both be monsters for the rest of their lives, child-bird hybrids who belonged in a zoo more than they belonged in a classroom?

“Did I surprise you?” Moon sat back on her heels, looking apologetic. “I didn’t mean to. But you’ve been asleep for so long, and I’m hungry, and the Archivist said we were going to go do some work today to try and pay off more of my debts.”

“There’s a man,” said Lundy, finally getting her breath back. “He does laundry. She said he might let us help him.”

“Oh.” Moon’s face fell. She held up hands which, while closer to normal than they had been, were still too long and thin to be anything other than changed. “I can’t fold clothes very well. My fingers don’t want to bend the right way.”

“That’s okay.” One good thing about sleeping in her clothes: she was already dressed, and she felt like she could run a mile if she had to. “I’ll do it. My hands are good, and once I pay back for the claws, they’ll be even better. Then you can take the value and buy yourself off.”

“I can’t pay you for that kind of generosity.”

“So we’ll make another promise.” Moon looked so small and lost that Lundy couldn’t imaginenottrying to help her. They had to help each other. If it wasn’t a rule, it should have been: it should have been hanging in the hall with all the others. Lundy offered her a wan smile. “I’ll do the work until you can help, and you can get more girl and less bird, and then if I need you to help me, you’ll do it. That’s fair value, right? The rules say it’s okay for me to work for you if you’re going to pay me sometime later. Like the rules said it was okay for you to do the bartering and get half of the pies.”

“I think that’s fair value,” said Moon slowly. Then, more firmly, she said, “Iknowit’s fair value. We’ve found fair value! Come on!”

She grabbed Lundy’s wrist with her long, strange fingers, hauling her to her feet. Lundy didn’t shudder from Moon’s touch. Together, they ran out of the shack and down the path, skirting around the edge of the great breathing body of the Market until they came to a platform constructed to overhang the stream. There, a man so old and weathered that he could have been grandfather to them all was stirring great wooden tubs full of laundry with a stick.

He wrinkled his nose when he saw them coming, and said, “It’s two buttons a load for something as soiled as what you’re wearing, and I can’t promise you’ll have all the ribbons back when I’m finished.”

“We’re not here to ask you to do more work,” said Lundy, who had always been good at being polite to adults, and could see that this wasn’t a man who often had children seek him out for kindness. “We were hoping we could do some of the work for you. If you wouldn’t mind.”

The old man lifted his eyebrows, looking first at Lundy, and then at Moon’s impossible fingers. “I’m too tired to be taking on debts for foolish little girls who couldn’t mind fair value,” he grumbled. “You’d have to accept the laundry yourself, not do what’s already here, and you’d have to do it proper, no slacking off or lollygagging. It’ll be hard and tiresome and not as fun as running wild in the woods all day.”

“Yes, but at the end of it, we won’t fly away,” said Lundy. “I think we can tolerate a little hard work if it means we keep our feet on the ground.”

Moon, who was closer to being a bird, and hence closer to the sky, looked unsure, but said nothing. She was still human enough to want to stay that way. The tipping point of her heart, if it existed, had not yet been reached.

The old man looked between them, and sighed. “All right,” he said. “I could do with a rest. You can use my supplies, and in exchange you’re to give me half of what you make. Soap doesn’t grow on trees, you know, not unless the weather’s gone strange.” He went back to stirring his pot of laundry, which didn’t feel much like resting to Lundy, but what did she know? She wasn’t an old man, and she didn’t operate her own business. She couldn’t call it “owning,” because there was no building, or sign, or business card—all the things she had learned to associate with the idea of owning a thing.

She and Moon sat on some rocks off to the side, and waited for people to bring their washing.

The first to arrive was a beleaguered-looking man with a long cow’s tail and four children trotting along behind him. All of them had tails like his, and the two girls had curving horns growing from their foreheads, on which they had tied a remarkable number of bows. His arms were full of clothes, which he tried to thrust at the old man.

“Not me, not today,” the old man said, and hooked a finger at Lundy and Moon. “These clever young things are working off a spot of debt. Give what wants doing to them. Payment’s as standard, and their work will be up to snuff or I’ll take fair value out of their hides.”

The cow-man—or bull-man, Lundy supposed—looked dubious, but handed his washing over anyway. “It all needs to be clean by high-sun,” he said. “The children will have found a mud puddle or something of the like by then, and we’ll have to start all over again.”

“You can count on us, sir,” said Lundy brightly. “It’ll be clean as anything.”

The bull-man still looked dubious. But one of the children had found a frog and was on the verge of pursuing it into the stream, and two more of them were already halfway up a tree, and the fourth was poking a stick into a hole, and it was clear he didn’t have the time to argue about laundry.

“Fine,” he said. “But I won’t pay until I’m back, and I won’t pay for anything I don’t receive.”

“Fair value,” agreed Lundy, and smiled prettily as the bull-man rounded up his children and ushered them away, to potentially less muddy climes.

When she turned, the old man was looking at her. “Well?” he said. “Get washing.”

Doing laundry by hand was even harder and less pleasant than Lundy, who had grown up with a washing machine, could ever have imagined. First they had to wet the clothes all the way down, and it seemed like the fabric fought this process, refusing to soak through even though she knew, justknewthat everything would have been drenched in an instant if she hadn’t wanted it to be. Then they had to beat the wet clothes against some rocks the old man had placed for that purpose, breaking up the stains, andthencame the soap, and the scrubbing, and the wringing-out.

Lundy had never cared for doing laundry. After an afternoon spent by the stream, washing other people’s clothing by hand, she thought she would welcome the chance to do it every day, forever, as long as she got to use the machine. The machine washeaven.

But the bull-man came back for his clothes, and was quietly pleased to find them clean and dry and ready, and he paid the man who owned the soap and barrels a handful of glittering sand, and some of the feathers fell out of Moon’s hair.

But the woman with the snails slithering through her hair came back for her flowing gowns, and was surprised and delighted to find them clean and damp and ready, and she paid the man a handful of empty snail shells that clattered like bones, and somehow the lines of Moon’s face relaxed so that her orange eyes were only human-sized, and not large and round as buttons.

Over and over, their customers came back for their things and found fair value had been more than given, and they paid, how they paid! The old man looked more and more satisfied as their day’s take increased, until he turned to them as the sun was setting and said, “You have done better than I had any right to expect you to. Come back anytime.”

He handed Lundy a silver coin with tarnish along the edge, like a small and captive moon, and the talons fell from her fingers, leaving them stubby and childlike once again. She felt an unexpected pang of regret, like she had just given up something precious, which made no sense at all. How could having claws possibly be precious?

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