Page 16 of Lost in the Moment and Found

“I… I live here,” said Antsy. The sentence was still unfamiliar in her mouth, like a new tooth too large for the space it had grown to fill. But like a new tooth, she knew, it would become familiar with time, until it was just a part of the shape of things, until she forgot what it was like to run her tongue over anything else.

That’s one of the things about living in a body. It can change, but the ways it changes today will be the ways it has always been tomorrow. If the modification isn’t noted in the moment, then it can be all too easily dismissed.

This will be important later. But it isn’t important now, and it wasn’t important then, as two girls and a bird moved deeper into the store.

“Oh, that must be wonderful,” said the girl. “My mother says this place is a nexus, and you can go almost anywhere from here. But I can only visit. I can’t stay.”

Antsy, who wasn’t sure how the girl thought she was going to go home again, frowned a little, and kept following the flicker of Hudson’s wings. They were passing aisles she’d never seen before, each one packed with shelves and racks of clothing, each shelf and rack groaning under the weight of everything they held. This place was an endless cavern of treasures, and she could explore for a hundred years without seeing the end of it.

“They know about the Doors where you come from?” was all she asked.

“Of course,” said the girl, sounding stung. “We’re acivilizedworld.”

Antsy didn’t like what that implied about her own world, and so she didn’t say anything else, just kept following Hudson until she heard something new from up ahead, something that sounded surprisingly like a dog barking. Hudson swooped around a corner. The two girls followed, and what they found there was a space that looked like a cross between the livestock barn at a state fair and an adoption event for an animal rescue. The shelves of books and knick-knacks were gone, and in their place were cages and tanks and tall habitats with multiple levels. Cats and rabbits, ferrets and rats, even dogs and foxes watched them with bright eyes. Birds rattled the bars of their cages, while snakes slithered and lizards skittered through the loam of their own tanks.

It was huge. It was impossible. It should have smelled like a barn and required daily cleaning, but somehow Antsy had never seen it before, never even suspected it might exist. It seemed ridiculous that she wouldn’t have been called to feed something at least once, or asked to pick up pet food during one of their shopping trips, but here they were, and there were all the animals, and they should have had an entire staff devoted to nothing but their care. They should have beennoticeable.

The girl made a wordless sound of delight and scurried off to look at the cages and cages of cats while Antsy stood in open-mouthed amazement. Hudson swooped toward her. She put up her arm to give him a perch, a gesture that had become so habitual that it was almost instinct by this point. He settled, claws gripping tight, and preened himself for amoment before clacking his beak in satisfaction and looking at her face.

“Well?” he asked. “What’s wrong this time?”

“How is this here? I should have seen it by now. Vineta should be asking me to clean cages every day. And is that aunicorn?”

“It’s here because animals get lost sometimes, same as anything else, and you haven’t seen it because we didn’t need it, and so we lost track of it.”

That seemed awfully convenient, and Antsy was about to say so when a worse thought struck her. “Children get lost too,” she said. “Is there an orphanage in here somewhere?”

“No! That would be ridiculous.” Hudson fluffed out his feathers in annoyance. “Children get lost, but the only ones who wind up here are the ones like you, who the Doors already wanted to keep track of.”

The way Hudson and Vineta talked about the Doors, they were both alive and aware. They watched people without making themselves known, and they had opinions, and they wanted things. Why they wanted the things they did, or why some worlds knew about the doors while so many others didn’t, was less than clear, but all of them were somehow connected anyway. Antsy felt like there was a secret lurking just out of reach, and once she understood it, she would be able to go anywhere she wanted.

She would be able to go home. Even now, after seven months in this strange and ever-surprising place, she didn’t regret what she had done; Tyler had given her what felt like no choice, and she had made the decision that was best for her in that moment. But she also missed her mother, and felt like she’d done her a disservice by disappearing so abruptly. She would be missed. She knew that without question. So eventually, no matter how much this place came to feel like home, she would need to find a way to get back.

It was only a matter of knowing how.

“So not all children need Doors?” Sometimes she asked questions that Hudson and Vineta treated as absolutely obvious, things that didn’t really need asking, but it was the only way to get them to explain anything. Left to their own devices, they would say things that overturned everything she thought she knew about the way the world—any of the worlds—worked and then just walk away like it was nothing.

It wasn’t nothing. It was everything.

Hudson gave her what she had come to recognize as the avian equivalent of a pitying look and said, “No. Only the ones who aren’t made right for the worlds where they started outneedDoors. All children maywantthem—who doesn’t want a grand adventure? But needing and wanting aren’t the same, and the Doors can see the difference. Some children need to escape from places that will only hurt them, or grind them away until they’re nothing. And some children need to go somewhere else if they’re ever going to grow into the people they were meant to be. The Doors choose carefully.”

“So I’m special?” The idea was appealing. Who didn’t want to be special?

So it was almost disappointing when Hudson ruffled his feathers and said, “Only as special as the kitten who gets picked first from a litter of twelve. It’s luck as much as anything. Our Door almost always looks like a door. If you hadn’t run away when you did, or if you hadn’t tried to use the door you did, you wouldn’t be here. The Doors have to choose you, but then you have to choose yourself. Luck and timing. Just looking for something lost doesn’t make you Lost yourself.”

The stranger girl was walking back toward them, a squirming ball of calico fur in her hands. “I found her!” she crowed, and held the kitten up for their approval. It squirmed in her hands, mewling and opening brown-feathered wings in frustrated feline protest.

Antsy blinked. Whatever world this girl came from, it was very different from her own. “Oh,” she said, after a brief pause to reorient herself. “Well, she’s lovely. Was that all you needed? You didn’t lose anything else?”

“Just a shoe once, but that was when I was smaller, and it wouldn’t fit me now,” said the girl brightly. “I’m ready to go home.”

Antsy, whose own answer would have been much longer and much more painful, felt a pang of jealousy. This girl could go home. This girl hadn’t lost anything worth looking for; nothing larger than a kitten, anyway. This girl didn’t know what it was to be lost herself, to feel like the world was set against her, to be hurt. This girl was innocent.

And just like that, Antsy’s anger burst. This girl was innocent. This girlcouldgo home. She could be safe and comfortable and cared for and unafraid. That mattered. That was something important, something worth taking care of and protecting. “I’ll walk you back to your Door,” said Antsy, and turned, starting back the way they had come, Hudson riding along on her arm.

The girl followed with her kitten. They had only gone a few steps when the sound of the animals behind them cut off, replaced by silence. There was no tapering off, no fading, just abrupt absence. Antsy smiled. The shop didn’t think they needed the menagerie anymore, and had put it back wherever it was that it went when they forgot to look for it. Well, good. She didn’t have time to take care of a pet, anyway.

The girl kept up a steady stream of nonsense conversation as they walked, commenting on everything they passed withthe wide-eyed wonder of one who never expected to see anything quite so grand ever again. Antsy nodded and made accommodating noises, letting the words wash over her and not quite listening, not really. None of it mattered. The girl was going to go back to her life and her world and be safe and loved and cared for, and Antsy was going to stay here, where the lost things belonged.

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