Page 18 of Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

Her voice echoed through the rafters, booming off into the distance, where it lost all texture and definition and seemed to become nothing more than the simple sound of thunder.

Sumi dropped her hands. “Huh,” she said again. “Big place. Guessing you could look for something in here for a long, long time and not find it if it didn’t want to be found.”

“Yeah,” said Emily, giving her a perplexed look. Voices and footsteps hurried toward them through the shelves, and a moment later, Antsy came around the corner, the rest of the group behind them.

“Sumi!” said Christopher, hurrying forward. “Girl, you scared us halfway to death. I thought we’d lost you.”

“I’m a bad penny,” said Sumi. “I always turn up, even when you halfway wish I wouldn’t. Have you been having a grand adventure in the universe’s junk shop?”

“Mostly we’ve been following Antsy around and watchingher get lost, which is novel enough to be almost entertaining,” said Cora. “Also, I found the friendship bracelet my second-grade bestie made for me before her family moved to Florida. I lost it that same summer.”

“Stay here long enough, you might find your second-grade bestie, isn’t that right, Antsy?” asked Sumi.

Antsy looked uncomfortable. “People don’t usually wind up here. People are smart enough that they don’t get lost very much without intending to, and someone losing track of you doesn’t meanyou’rewhat got lost. It normally means what got lost was caring about what the people looking for you think.”

“What a fascinating and convoluted cosmology you must live with here, said the girl made of literal living gingerbread who exists in an asynchronous timeline. How fun it must be to think about at night.”

“You don’t have to be mean,” said Antsy.

“Sadly, sometimes, I do,” said Sumi. “If I was nice all the time, that would be predictable, and if I become predictable, I die inside.”

“Do you think the store is hiding the front desk from you?” asked Cora. “Why would it do that?”

“I think it’s hiding the people I’ll find there from me, and it’s doing that because it doesn’t want me to yell at them the way I did the last time I was here,” said Antsy.

Emily frowned. “Why did you yell?”

“Because they’ve been lying to kids and letting them get hurt when they didn’t have to, and it’s not fair and it’s not right and it’s not the way this place should be.” Antsy shook her head, eyes bright with anger and conviction. “This is a good place. It’s a necessary place. It’s a nexus, the same as Earth; almost all the Doors can open here, even if they can’ton every world there is. Lost things from all over everywhere wind up here, and sometimes people come to find them, and sometimes people come because they need something only we can give them.”

“This is normally where there’s a catch,” said Christopher.

“There are so many Doors here that it’s almost impossible to resist them, and they cost so much more than you realize when you start, and the people who should be warning the newcomers about the toll aren’t doing it,” said Antsy. “They didn’t have to do that. They didn’t have to lie, or hide things. The Store knows that, or it wouldn’t have let me learn it.”

“But it’s protecting those people?” asked Christopher.

“It could be.”

“I don’t like that at all,” he said. “There might be something I can do. Hang on just a second.”

And he raised his bone flute to his lips, and he began to play. Or to pantomime playing: only Sumi smiled and swayed along to the music none of the rest of them could hear. And in the dust under the shelves, something rustled.

Antsy gave a little scream and jumped back as skeleton mice and beetle shells began creeping into the open, moving on legs that had no flesh remaining, waving broken, dust-covered antennae.

Christopher lowered his flute, smiling.

“You saidpeopledidn’t tend to get lost unless they meant to,” he said. “These weren’t people. They were small and they got swept up into the wrong places, but they weren’t people. And some of them died here. You can find mice and beetles in every shop in the world, even the very cleanest. They’re part of this place now. Even if it doesn’t want you to find the front desk, they’ll be able to show us the way.”

“Really?” Antsy looked to the tiny scattering of skeletons and chitin on the floor. “Can you show us to the front desk?”

The skeletons made no sound, but bobbed their assorted heads in what looked like agreement before turning to scamper down the aisle, in the opposite direction of whatever Antsy had been leading them toward. Christopher raised his flute and started playing again.

More tiny creatures emerged to join their strange procession. Emily smiled as a pair of skeleton mice ran over her shoe.

“Just like home,” she said.

They kept walking.

The aisle gave way to another, almost identical aisle, which gave way to a series of shorter aisles filled with bookshelves, followed by a long corridor of dish hutches, each filled with mismatched dinner sets and chipped wineglasses. This corridor, at last, opened into a wide space, open enough for them to all gather together rather than walking single file. Three sides of it were surrounded by more of the endless maze of shelving. The fourth was dominated by a long, time-worn wooden counter with an old-fashioned register on one end and a well-lit employee area visible behind it. A stairway to an unseen second floor rose to one side, the steps stacked with more items, like even in this infinity of shelves, there could never be enough.

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