Page 18 of Lost in the Moment and Found

But even the most delicious cheese must eventually be eaten, and when the last of lunch was put away, Vineta vanished again, and Antsy and Hudson had the run of the store.

Nothing else about that afternoon or evening stood out in Antsy’s memory: it had been a day like any other, once they were past lunch, and she’d gone to bed once again content with the things she had done and the choices she had made. And it never even occurred to her that she hadn’t spent any time looking for the Door that would take her home.

The next morning when she woke, her calves hurt. She had to rub them for almost a solid minute before she got out of bed, and they still felt odd as she walked to the bathroom and reached for her toothbrush. She was halfway through brushing her teeth when she realized the holes left by her baby teeth were gone; her adult teeth had finished growing overnight, and fit smoothly into her mouth. She bared her teeth at the mirror, studying her reflection, trying to see the shape of her adult smile in her reflection. It wasn’t quite there yet, but it felt like it was coming, like the bones of her face were rearranging themselves to prepare for the woman she was going to be. Antsy dropped her toothbrush back into its cup with a feeling of solemn satisfaction and scampered back to her room to check under her pillow.

The lost teeth were gone, replaced by two large chocolate coins and a note with a shelf location written in unfamiliar handwriting, and under that, a single sentence:

Nothing comes free; ask them what it costs you.

The note wasn’t signed. Antsy frowned and put it on the dresser while she turned to put on her clothes for the day, and the stirring of the air from pulling off her nightgown was enough to send the note tumbling behind the dresser, where she promptly forgot about it. Not in the casual way of forgetting things when they lack importance; no, this was a forgetting so profound that the thing forgotten might as well never have existed. She’d lost nothing. There had been nothing to lose.

The chocolate coins were still on her pillow. She snatched them as she ran out of the room, and she didn’t look back.

It wouldn’t be until a morning almost two years later, when all her remaining baby teeth had been bought and paid for with chocolate, and no more mysterious notes, that she would even remember that she’d lost something.

By that point, it would almost be too late.

8WHAT WE LOSE ALONG THE WAY

ON THE MORNING WHENAntsy woke feeling as if she’d forgotten something, she had been sleeping in the little room at the top of the shop for two years. Two years since she’d run away from home and stumbled through a door and found herself pressed into a job she was only just beginning to think she truly understood. Two years of strange new worlds almost every day—sometimes several times a day; her record was eleven, and that had left her not only frustrated by how little she’d been able to see of each world but also so exhausted and disoriented that she’d gone to bed and slept for almost an entire week, after which Hudson had put his talon down with Vineta and restricted her to a maximum of five Doors a day. Antsy had been grateful but sorry; the markets were her favorite part of the day, and their constant variety kept her from getting bored when so much time was spent on sorting and shelving.

She sometimes felt as if she was missing something, not attending a traditional school, but she could read and write well enough to enjoy the storybooks she sometimes found written in English, and a handful of words and phrases in a hundred other languages. She could make change in three dozen currencies, and carry a basket that weighed half as much as she did. She could even navigate the shop without help, and did so most days, spending the first part of her mornings hunting through the shelves for Doors that had appeared in the night. It had taken her most of the first year to learn that sheshould just make note of their locations and not attempt to open them; every turn of the knob unlocked another world, and she had lost many promising markets and tempting fields before she’d realized she should leave them alone while she fetched Vineta.

She had been seven going on eight when she found the Shop Where the Lost Things Go, and now she was nine going on ten. She had a very good sense of how long it had been, both thanks to the calendars she sometimes found on the shelves and her own accounting of the days. she knew how long she’d been here, and how long her mother had been waiting to see her again. Two years. One day she would find the Door that took her home. One day.

But until then, she had a job to do, and because she had been here so long, she didn’t find it entirely odd that she had grown during those two years. If there had been anyone around for her to compare herself to apart from Vineta, she might have realized something was wrong, but with only an ancient woman and a bird to measure herself against, it didn’t seem all that strange that she had gone from a perfectly reasonable four feet to almost five and a half feet in height over the course of just two years.

Some of the other changes had been more of a surprise. When she’d woken up with blood on her sheets, Vineta had sat her down for a halting, uncomfortable conversation about babies and the making of them, and how to handle cramping and cleaning up after herself. She’d finished that conversation with a critical look at the full length of Antsy, and a muttered “I thought we’d be doing this sooner, with you being nine when you first got here. But I suppose longer is better, in the main stretch of things.” And then she’d sent Antsy upstairs, restricted from her duties for the day.

There had been a basket of sanitary products in the bathroom that day, and an assortment of herbal teas in her bedroom, ready to be brewed, as well as a drawer filled with new underpants and several training bras that fastened at the back and relieved a pressure Antsy had barely noticed building in her chest. And since, again, she had no one to compare herself to, she hadn’t really noticed that other things were changing perhaps faster than they really should have.

The girl who left her room, paused, and turned to walk back inside, was almost three months shy of her tenth birthday, and she had the face and figure of a girl well past the age of sixteen, cruising through her teen years and cresting toward adulthood.

The feeling that she’d forgotten something was still there, pressing down on her, making it difficult to think about breakfast or doors or stocking or any of the other things that should have been occupying her mind by now. She stopped in the middle of her bedroom and turned a slow, deliberate circle, allowing her thoughts to go blurry and unfocused.

The feeling of something being forgotten was often a message from the shop itself, an attempt at communication by something essentially voiceless. She’d learned to listen, over the years. That seemed to be the key, the thing that made it all better. Listening.

Her eyes caught on something white under the dresser, down among the dust bunnies and the tiny feathers that Hudson sometimes lost during his infrequent molts. He’d done it four times since she’d come to the shop, and every time he was left unable to fly for weeks, petulant and unhelpful as he sulked on his perch. She usually swept up after a molt, but it wasn’t odd for her to miss a few bits of downy fluff.

Still, it was odd for a feather big enough to see to get forgotten. Antsy dropped to her knees. Maybe it was a sock. Lost socks were incredibly common in the shop and could appear virtually anywhere, not just in the stock rooms in the back. It was like there were so many that the shop couldn’t channel them all the way it was supposed to. They disappeared just as quickly, popping in and out of view as people found them in the ordinary way.

Two years, and Antsy still wasn’t entirely clear on the mechanism by which items could vanish on their own, called back to the place where they’d begun without the shortcut of shopping in a place filled with other things just like them, things that might be waiting for their owners to come and reclaim them. She’d learned to hear the hum of the shop telling her an item was safe to sell, that its owner had replaced it or forgotten it or otherwise moved on, and when she didn’t find it, she would offer something else instead, preserving the things that still might be come for like flies in amber.

Her questing fingers didn’t find a sock or a feather under the dresser. Instead, they brushed against a piece of paper. She pulled it out into the light, squinting at what was written there. She remembered it, vaguely, like it was something she’d read once in a dream.

Nothing comes free; ask them what it costs you.

The urge to put it back under the dresser was swift, and so heavy that she began the motion before she realized what was happening. Antsy scowled, balling her hand into a fist with the paper caught inside. “No,” she informed the ceiling. “I know you want this to be lost, and I don’t understand why, but I don’t care, either. You’re a store, you don’t get to tell me what to do.”

Then she stood, and the air was heavy around her, pressing down, like the store could absolutely tell her what to do if itwanted to, and she was being the unreasonable one by trying to say it couldn’t. Antsy brushed it off with the grace that came from long practice as she left the room and descended the stairs.

Hudson and Vineta weren’t up yet. Both of them were inclined to stay abed longer than she was, which Vineta blamed on having old bones and Hudson blamed, more frankly, on being a lazy bird. Antsy checked the paper again, making silent note of the shelf location written at the top, and began to walk.

It took a while. Near as she could tell, the shop was close to infinite, filled with aisles and tiny rooms that only existed when someone needed them. The door to the yard was on the other side of the employee area, and the yard itself was easily as large as the shop it was attached to. Antsy was normally careful not to go too deep, out of the genuine fear that if she did, she might not be able to find her way back without sending up a flare or starting a fire or something.

Hudson always seemed to know exactly where the things he was looking for were located. He had an innate sense of the shop’s geography and current stock levels that Antsy assumed was connected to this being his world of origin. He had started out here; of course he understood it, the way she assumed she would slide back into the world she’d left without missing a beat when she finally got to go home. You knew the place you came from.

But something told her that going back to fetch Hudson wouldn’t do her any good, that it wouldn’t find the thing she was looking for or make her search any easier. It was such an odd feeling that she focused on it as she walked past aisles filled with things she didn’t recognize, things made for use in worlds other than her own. Who could possibly have useda sword made of candy glass, so brittle it would shatter as soon as someone swung it, breaking without doing any real damage? Or a harp made of bones? That one was unsettling. Antsy shuddered and walked faster, leaving it behind, until she finally reached the section the note had indicated.

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