Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

PART III

STAYING LOST

7

ONE’S FOR SORROW, TWO’S FOR JOY

ANTSY WOKE TO SUNLIGHT streaming through her bedroom window and the feeling of having forgotten something terribly important. That wasn’t unusual, really; after more than two years spent living and working in the Shop Where the Lost Things Go, it was more common for her to wake up having forgotten something than it was for her to wake up knowing everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.

Her first six months in the shop, the thing she’d forgotten was the way to get home, which should have been the simplest thing in the world: she’d passed through a single door, looking for help, and what she’d found was a whole new world, one where the rules rarely flowed the same way from one day into the next, one where most of her time was spent in the company of a talking, opinionated magpie, or wandering through the outdoor shopping plazas of impossible realities that she could never seem to find a second time, one where doors and Doors were different things. All she had to do was find her way back to the right Door and she’d be out of here, easy as anything.

Only not so much, as it turned out. No matter how many Doors she opened—and she opened a lot of Doors, she opened so many Doors that even Vineta was impressed—they didn’t lead to anything she recognized as the world she’d come from, or even anything close to it. Worlds of talking porcelain dolls and worlds of dragons, a terrifying world filled with dinosaurs that roared and chased and sold no wares, making Vineta’s claim that all the Doors opened on places with people somewhat more confusing. Another world cast entirely in black and white, where even Hudson seemed like an offensive riot of color against the monochrome sky.

After six months of Doors, Antsy had been forced to admit that she was here until she wasn’t lost anymore, and so had started helping more properly with the daily operation of the shop, for the sake of earning her keep. Her keep, such as it was, seemed to be a nebulous sort of thing; both Hudson and Vineta would exclaim over how much she’d managed to buy and how good her instincts were every time she came back from a shopping trip, something that was only possible when she opened one of the Doors to get there … or so she thought.

She had been in her seventh month at the shop, standing behind the counter while Hudson showed her how to work the register, when a door that hadn’t been there a moment before swung open in the wall across from them. It should have knocked over several shelves. It didn’t. It should have been prevented from opening by the pile of broken lawn gnomes Vineta had placed against the wall, claiming they would be decorative. They weren’t, and it wasn’t. Instead, it opened, and a girl stepped into the shop, blinking rapidly as she tried to take in everything around her at the same time.

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