Page 19 of Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

A small bronze bell rested there, next to a perch that looked like it was designed for some sort of large parrot. Only Antsy seemed to take any notice of it.

The rest of them were busy staring at the doors.

They seemed to appear on every possible surface, on walls, on shelves, sometimes without any surface at all. A few would have been accessible only by ladder, or by someonewho already knew how to fly. Others were freestanding, doorframes appearing in the middle of an aisle. They came in an endless array of styles and colors, with knobs of polished metal, crystal, and petrified bone. One even had a large, living rose where a doorknob should have been, yet somehow there was no question that it was a door: anyone could have turned the knob and stepped through.

Anyone.

Antsy ignored them, walking stiff-legged toward the counter and slamming her hand down on the bell so hard that the ringer bit into her flesh. A tinny chime rang through the area.

No one came to answer it.

“Service!” she yelled. “I have come through a valid door to the Store Where the Lost Things Go, and I demand service as a customer!”

Something rustled at the top of the stairs. Emily and Cora wrenched their eyes away from the doors—for Emily, a door made of sticks and straw, through which flickers of firelight could be seen; for Cora, a door that seemed to have been made from woven kelp, which rippled and pulsed with the endless motion of the sea—and turned toward the rustling.

A child, no more than six or seven, ran down the stairs. She wore a dress of patchworked gingham, like something out of a fairy tale, and her hair was pulled into messy pigtails much like Sumi’s, save for the fact that they were tied with mismatched ribbons instead of licorice ropes. Her feet were bare, and there were two small white scars on the side of her neck that telegraphed her world of origin as loudly as any announcement, at least to those who had been to the Moors. Cora shivered and turned away.

“Sorry, sorry!” said the girl, voice bright and quick andsuited to her steps. She flung herself behind the register, then turned toward Antsy, small face glowing with the eagerness to be of service. “Hello I’m Yulia, welcome to the Store Where the Lost Things Go, how may I help you today?”

It came out almost as one long word, rushed and rattled off, but clear and perfect all the same. Yulia glowed with pride, even as Antsy looked at her with horror.

“Where are Hudson and Vineta?” she asked, voice going shrill. “Why are you alone here?How old are you?”

The last question that seemed to matter the most, because she stared at Yulia after it was asked, waiting for an answer. Yulia looked uncomfortably around the group of teens, then back to Antsy, before she said, in an uncertain tone, “I’m… five? At my last birthday, I was five. That’s when the Master took my sister to be one of his daughters.”

She started to cry then, overwhelmed as any child would be by a group of strangers staring and shouting at her. The curtain behind the counter rustled and was drawn aside as an ancient woman in a long silk dressing gown stepped out, leaning heavily on a walking stick as she fixed her rheumy eyes on Antsy.

“Just because the Store decided your services were no longer needed, that doesn’t give you the authority to yell at your replacement,” she said, voice stiff and sharp and commanding.

Listening to it, Kade could easily see why a confused child would accept this woman as an immediate authority.Hehalf-wanted to accept her as an authority, and he was nowhere near the age of the trembling Yulia, or even the righteously furious Antsy.

“The Store let me leave because I wasn’t sure that people who’d spent my childhood like someone else’s coins had the right to keep me,” said Antsy, voice icy. “If it didn’t want mehere, it didn’t have to let me come back. None of my companions are suitable employees. You look like you’ve aged a few years in my absence, Vineta. Couldn’t resist when you didn’t have a convenient child to exploit?”

Vineta stiffened. “You have no right to come into my home and talk to me like that,” she spat.

“And you have no right to stand behind that counter telling lies to children, but here we are.” Antsy continued to glare at her. “Elodina’s spirit remained in this place long past when she should have been allowed to rest, because the Store neededsomeoneto do what you refused to do. Someone had to warn them, had to warnus,before we followed you to the grave.”

“Age is a fair trade for experience,” said Vineta.

“This isn’t the Goblin Market,” countered Antsy. “Not everything is about fair value. And is it really fair value if you don’t understand what you’re paying? I opened one Door to get us here. One of my companions opened another. We both knew the price before we paid it.” She turned to Yulia. “Did she ever tell you what it costs to open a Door?”

The smaller girl sniffled, but had not yet started to cry. “I don’t have any money,” she said. “And I don’t have anythingsapart from what I’m wearing. But I still have all the blood in my veins, and all my memories of my sister are sunlit ones. That’s enough for me. If the Doors cost something to open, it’s a good exchange for comfort and safety and a full stomach and no vampires scratching at the windowpanes begging our mother to let them come home.”

“See?” Vineta smiled at Antsy, triumphant. “Yulia understands a good trade when she sees one. She knows this is the right place for her.”

“She is achild,” said Antsy.

“So are you.”

“Not anymore!” Antsy spread her arms wide, making it impossible to miss the height of her, the obvious age of her. “I’m a teenager, and I won’t ever get to be a child again, and I didn’t get to be a child the first time. If I want to do childish things, or be with other kids, I’ll be judged for being weird, or being threatening, or being scary, because you took the time when I should have been allowed to play and turned it into something else. You turned it into trying to survive, to serve the adults around me, and you didn’t care if it was hurting me, because it wasn’t hurtingyou. As long as it wasn’t hurting someone who mattered, you didn’t care.”

“No one warned me. Why are you owed anything different?”

Antsy shook her head. “Just because someone hurt you when you were a child, that doesn’t make it right for you to hurt anyone else.”

“Says the girl who dragged a legion of the door-touched to the land of their deepest desires.” Vineta turned her attention to the rest of the group. “She told you what this place was, didn’t she? Did she also tell you not to pick forbidden fruits?”

“She did,” said Kade.

---