Page 19 of Lost in the Moment and Found

This space was… odd. The shelves were dusty, which didn’t happen in even the most underused parts of the shop; even when no one went there, the shop kept itself clean, within the limits of its ill-defined ability. They were as crowded with items as any other shelf she might have wanted to examine, but they didn’t seem to make any sense. They weren’t grouped by category, or by color, and even the assumption that they were sorted by world of origin didn’t survive glancing at more than one of the shelving units. Each shelf seemed to consist only of items from a single world, but each unit had at least six shelves, and since she was finally tall enough to reach the highest of them—which felt odd and utterly natural at the same time; she’d been the one who lived with all that growth, day by day, and so it should be perfectly reasonable for her to reach the top shelves.

And each shelf in each unit held things that clearly came from a different world. Antsy picked up a plush rabbit, knocking loose a cloud of dust, and almost dropped it as a new feeling swept over her, one she’d never gotten before, from anything.

It wasn’t lost. It knew exactly where its owner was, and it had no desire to be handled by anyone else. Antsy forced her fingers to stay locked in place, mostly because if she dropped it, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to pick it up again. It kept radiating the feeling that she was doing something wrong, that she had no right, no authority, noreasonto be touching it in the first place. But she didn’t want to leave it on the floor to get kicked under a shelf and forgotten, and that waswhat would happen if she let go. She breathed in and out through her nose, trying to understand the frozen disdain coming off the stuffed bunny, and finally found what felt like an answer. The rabbit’s owner was dead, lost to the dust and the silence, but that owner was somehow still in the shop. The rabbit wasn’t lost, had neverbeentruly lost, because its owner had always known exactly where it was.

Antsy shivered and put it back where she’d found it, looking at the rest of the shelf. The first few items were like the rabbit, a little worn and tattered, but well loved and used by the hands of their person. After that, things became more impersonal, more like icons of events than actual reminders of them. A small, tarnished brass trophy. A photo album she didn’t quite dare to touch. A stick of unburnt incense. It was very odd.

The last item on the shelf was a glass jar filled to the brim with human teeth. The ones at the bottom were small and white, children’s lost teeth, and the ones at the top were larger, worn and yellowed, like they’d come from the mouth of an adult. Antsy shuddered and turned her attention to the next shelf down.

It was the same story: small personal items fading into icons, teeth at the end. And the shelf beneath it, and the one beneath that, and all the shelves around her, hundreds of them stretching out into forever. She looked around, wide-eyed, trying to figure out what this section could possibly represent.

Her directions had included a shelf as well as a section. Suddenly direly afraid she didn’t want to know, she uncrumpled the note and began counting her way along the units toward the one she’d been sent to find. It was most of the way to the end of the row. The unit looked just like all the others, and then Antsy saw the shelf and stopped being able to catch her breath.

The first item was her backpack, the one she’d been carrying when she fell through the shop door, and how had it gotten here? It was covered by a thick layer of dust and had clearly been here for quite some time, and as she stared at it, she realized she couldn’t remember when she’d lost it. Next to it was a shoe, one of the ones she’d been wearing on that first day. It looked impossibly small, like it could never have encompassed her foot. Next to it was a coin from the first Door she’d actually gone through intentionally, the Door into Dejanira, and a little tuft of blue-purple fur. That should have pinged as being from a different world than the backpack and the shoe, but it felt like everything else around it, like it belonged where it was, a part of this set. She realized she couldn’t trust the shelves to be telling her the truth about where their contents had come from, and she worried her lip between her teeth for a moment before reaching out and brushing her fingertips against the coin.

It wasn’t lost; like the bunny, it was still tethered to its owner, and was precisely where it belonged. But it didn’t radiate rejection or the feeling she needed to take her hand away. Instead, it welcomed her touch like it was coming home, and when she closed her eyes, she saw the market, saw herself walking with Sákos, and the last two years had been so wild and strange that it wasn’t the sight of the human-sized feline that caused her to yank her hand away from the coin, shattering the memory that had been more like a movie, herself seen from the outside.

No, it wasn’t Sákos. It was the little girl next to him, thechild.

She was still a child, shewas,she was nine years old, but the girl in her vision was so impossibly small that it was like being told she’d gone from a sapling to a tree in just twoyears. Hand shaking, Antsy reached out and touched the coin again. There was no second vision. Almost frantic now, she grabbed for the next item on the shelf—a pencil with toothmarks deeply etched into the wood—and gasped when she saw herself again, taller than she’d been in the previous snapshot, but still obviously so much younger than she had looked in the mirror that morning. She pulled her hand away and looked at the rest of the shelf.

It was sparse compared to the shelves around it, no more than a quarter full, and every item recognizable. At the very end of the line was a small jar, like all the others, its base covered by a layer of tiny white teeth. All of them were baby teeth, and there were so many of them. Her adult teeth had always come in so quickly that she’d never really stopped to think about how fast she was losing them, but it had beenveryfast, hadn’t it? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a tooth to lose. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, feeling the now-familiar topography of her adult teeth. No, that part of her growing was done, even though it shouldn’t have been.

She should havenoticed.If she’d somehow… if she was that much bigger than she should have been, if she had grown up in the span between seconds, she should have known about it. She reached for the jar, grabbing it like it would somehow give her the answers she so desperately desired.

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 whiteteeth 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 IVHOW TO GET FOUND

9REVENGE OF THE LOST THINGS

EVENTUALLY, ANTSY’S TEARS RANout, 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 upfaster than she should have been able to, rocketing toward adulthood, spending hours she’d never be able to recover! She should have hadtime.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 shesaid, “It was magical. It was everything I’d ever wanted, and I never, ever wanted to go home.”

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