Page 22 of Lost in the Moment and Found

“Elodina is gone. She opened a door this morning, and upon seeing that the other side was a vast and tangled forest like the ones she had described from her childhood, she sighed, and bid me to be careful in the remainder of my time here, and stepped through. The toll thus paid, I followed her, and helped her into the shadow of a great tree, where she sat and closed her eyes and held my hand until her breath stopped, and she was over. The great tale of her being shall be extended no more; she is gone to the Library where all of us must one day be Returned, and she will pay no overdue fines on her soul.

“But I will miss her so very much. She was my first and only friend, and I am lost without her.”

Antsy sniffled, dragging the back of her hand across her cheeks, which were wet with streaky tears. Elodina had died long before she arrived here—it was impossible to say howlong ago, with the apparent age of the store and the way the doors ate time—but still, she felt she knew her now, and it was easy to grieve for her. For what she’d lost, and what she’d found, and the fact that they had never been able to be children together.

Returning her attention to the book, she read on:

“A girl came through one of the doors today, and it closed behind her. She has a broken arm and she screamed herself awake when she tried to sleep. I think she will be staying for a while. Her name is Anya, and she yearns for safety. I can offer her that.

“I have told her what the doors demand, and she is young yet; she sees no danger in the exchange. Time for travel is a tempting bargain to her. I have few enough doors remaining to me, but if she will open them while her time is long, then it will not matter that my time grows short. We can continue our work. The sorting of the things behind the shop requires only our effort, and the travel to other worlds repays us in food and drink and wonders.

“We can be happy here. This is Elodina’s book, and this is the last I will write within it. Her story ended with her; let me return her accounting to the shelf the shop has made for her. It has made another such for me, and I believe Anya will have a shelf soon, if it is not there already. We were lost and now we have been found, and that is more than good enough for a man like me.”

There was nothing more. Antsy stood, looking down the row of shelving units, each one containing multiple shelves, each shelf packed with mementos of someone who had spent all their time here. Slowly, she put the book back where it belonged and turned toward the aisle.

She and Vineta were going to have a conversation, and ifshe didn’t like the way it went, she was done here. She would open one more door, and she would allow it to close behind her, and she would be gone.

All she needed was to know.

11A CONVERSATION AND A CONCLUSION

HUDSON WAS ALREADY ATthe counter when Antsy came stalking out of the aisles, her chin down and her hands balled into fists. Years of working around bipeds had left Hudson better keyed to their moods and expressions than most birds, and he ruffled his feathers in dismay at the look on her face.

“Er, Antsy?” he said. “Is something wrong?”

“Where’s Vineta?”

“It’s early yet; we have inventory to do before it’s time to go gathering for the day. She’s not going to be up for hours. Surely whatever you need to talk to her about can… wait…”

Antsy cocked her head, eyes growing dark with unexpressed storms. “Elodina mentioned black-and-white birds,” she said. “She meant you and your people, didn’t she? The magpies who live here? Who come from this world? She knew you. Do you remember her? Do you have a counting rhyme about her, and Eider, and Anya, and all the other shopkeepers?”

Hudson shivered. “We do,” he admitted, voice small.

“Teach it to me.”

Hudson huddled on his perch, feathers puffed out until he was almost a sphere, and said nothing.

“You have a little rhyme for everything, you’re the accountant, so why can’t you teach methisrhyme, huh? What’s so different about it that it needs to be a secret? Unless it’s full of things you decided I didn’t need to know. When did you stoptelling us? When did you decide that since we were already lost, it didn’t matter if you used us up and threw us away? Huh? Huh?”

“Young lady, you will stop that at once,” said a voice from behind her. Antsy stiffened and turned, slowly, until she was facing Vineta. The old woman leaned on her cane and scowled at Antsy. “Hudson has done nothing to deserve your ire, and it is quite unfair of you to subject him to it.”

“Didyouknow?” demanded Antsy.

“When I first arrived? No. I didn’t. Elodina slipped me a note on what should have been my seventeenth birthday, but was actually closer to my twenty-third, and I found her shade walking the curator’s shelves, all but faded away. I thought the meddlesome thing had spent the last of her energy on trying to convince me to run. If I’d even suspected she might reach out to you, I would have done so many things differently. But we always see the past more clearly than we see the future, and she has done you no favors.”

Rage tightened Antsy’s skin and blurred her vision, making it difficult to focus on the old woman. “She told me the truth, which is more than I received fromyou.I don’t know why you weren’t told, but—”

“She wasn’t told because it changed nothing,” said Hudson miserably. “For two hundred years we’ve been here, helping the curators, making sure the Doors are cared for, making sure the wayfarers who came through them seeking what they’d already lost were seen to and seen home in short order. Two hundredyears.Ten generations of magpies have lived and died and seenhundredsof curators come through here, and when Elodina demanded her promise from Eider, we were exempt. She left us out of what she asked him. We were animals to her, inconsequential, even as we brought her everything sheneeded, even though we had watched over the Doors for generations before she came, even though we’ll be watching them long after the last curator is gone. But he told Anya, and Anya told Basia, and on, and on, and every one of them made the same choices, made the same decisions, ran through the Doors with the careless abandon of the first curator. But you know whatdidchange? Whatdidbecome different?”

He hopped down from his perch, stalking toward the counter’s edge. Antsy couldn’t take her eyes off of him. “They were guilty. They felt like they were being punished. They used the Doors anyway, but because they understood the consequences, they suffered for what they did. And they stayed, and they traveled, and they suffered, because they knew.”

“They needed to know because a choice you make without knowing the consequences isn’t any choice at all!” snapped Antsy. “If they still used the doors, that wastheirdecision. I didn’t know they were costing me anything.”

“You thought all this was free?” Hudson spread his wings, indicating the whole shop around them. “You should have known better. Nothing is free, no matter what world you’re in, or what world you’re from. Everywhere you’ve gone, you’ve paid for what you received.”

“But I…” Antsy stopped. The shop had taken care of her from the moment she arrived, hadn’t it? She’d always had a place to sleep and a belly full of food, and she’d never been sick, not even with a headache. The only times she’d needed to stay in bed, she’d been too tired from using the doors to get up, and on those days, soup and toast had been delivered to her room by unseen hands. The Shop Where the Lost Things Go took care of its contents, whatever their nature.

“I worked,” she said, finally. “From the day I got here, I worked, and I never had a salary from you. I never got apennyfor everything I did. And you were stealing from me. You were stealing my time—and you might be right, I might have given it freely, the same way Elodina did after she realized what was happening every time she used a door. We’ll never know now.”

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