Page 20 of Lost in the Moment and Found

“Why did you run away?”

“It was… it was bad.” The girl turned back to Antsy. “I had two sisters before me, and both of them died before they were grown, and no one would ever say why, only that they were gone from me. And then my first mother bore my father a son, a strong boy, and everyone said he would live, and I guess that was all he’d been waiting to hear. He started hitting me that same night. He broke my wings, so badly they never straightened again, and I would never be able to fly upon my own majority. I would have no husband or household of my own, and still he didn’t stop, and still my mothers didn’t defend me. I knew if I stayed, I would die.” She looked at Antsy with wise, weary eyes. “You must have known something similar, to find my door.”

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 tobe 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.

10IN A TIME OF MISTS AND MOTHS

THE TEXT WAS SMALLand 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 inthe 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.

“I am strangely calm in the face of my own destruction. He has beaten me enough, and he will be kinder to both my mothers and to Mitrofan if I am gone. But still, I find I do not wish to die. I may never fly again, and still there are winds I have never tasted, fires I have never seen, and I yearn for them. I wish to be free of this fate that I did nothing to bring upon myself, did nothing to earn. So I will go.

“There is little enough here which belongs to me. I will take it all, and it will be no more than I can carry, even if I must descend to the ground. Better to be devoured in the dark thanto stay and be destroyed by a man who has every reason to love and care for me. He has no right to do as he has done. Let that be the crime for which I am finally convicted: my father is not a good man, and I will not pretend he is, will not praise him in ways he has not earned and never will. So I go tonight, alone, into the dark, and only hope I will survive it…”

Antsy skipped forward again, only a few pages this time, stopping when she caught the word “door” at the top of the page. She paused, frowning, and began to read again.

“… strange door led me to a room such as I have never seen before. The top of it is closed, not open to the sky as a proper room would be, and there is a glass shield over the window, preventing anyone who sleeps here from leaping out into the wind. It is solid and secure, and I think I will be safe here. The wound in my arm is beginning to scab over, and will be healed soon.”

So she had been injured somewhere in the intervening pages. Antsy almost flipped back, but pressed forward at the last second, more desperate to know whatwouldhappen than whathadhappened.

“It seems I am in an entirely new place, for when I open the door that led me here, it does not connect to the forest I left, but to a vast field filled with discarded items. They feel lost to me, as if they have been somehow taken from their proper owners. They wish to be returned. Doors dot the piles, common as red flowers in the fields of home, and I wonder where they might lead…”

A line break, and then:

“The doors lead to other worlds, each and every one of them. I opened one which showed an ocean such as Mother used to speak of. I had never seen an ocean before. I was afraidthis door might behave as the one which brought me here, and so I wedged it open with a stone before stepping through. The air pushed back against me for but a moment, and when I stood on the shell-speckled sand, the scab on my arm was all but gone, days of healing accomplished in an instant. I stared at it for a time, then gathered the loveliest of the shells I could see and carried them back through the door with me. The wound on my arm, though diminished, remained, and did not make any further improvements on the return journey. I must consider this.”

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