Hot New Toy

by

Seanan McGuire

"Angie? You okay?"

"Hmm?" I dragged my gaze away from my hand--my beautiful, flexible hand with the two chipped nails, which I had been opening and closing methodically for the last five minutes--to focus on my partner, who was watching me with obvious concern written broadly across his face.

Everything was written broadly across Doug's face. He had a lot of face to write on. If most of us were blackboards, he was a billboard, built for broadcast. Doug didn't do subtle. And right now, he was staring at me about as subtly as a brick to the head, very clearly waiting for me to do something to tell him he was wrong.

Unfortunately, I wasn't going to be able to. I closed my hand again, noting the increasing resistance in the joints, and said, "Not sure. I'm stiffening up."

"Well, maybe you--"

"No, I didn't pull something, I didn't do anything that should leave me feeling like this, and it's not limited to my hands. It's my whole body. I can't sit with my knees directly in front of me anymore. But when I turn my head, it goes too far."

"You think your joints are regressing?"

I sighed. "I think something's happening to Kendra, and we should go check it out." I stood, wincing as my hips popped back into alignment. "I need you to drive. I don't think I'm flexible enough to do it safely right now."

"Right," he said, nodding and anxious. "Meet you at the car."

"Great."

He walked away. After a moment to be sure my legs were going to work, I followed.

#

They call it the Williams Effect, I think because it sounds more official and serious than any of the other names that have been proposed over the years. Half my department are beneficiaries. The other half are divided between benefactors and people who were adjacent to one or the other as children. We're not law enforcement. We're only technically a government agency--our funding comes from a specific line item on your taxes, but it's small and getting smaller with every passing year, and soon enough we'll be funding ourselves with bake sales and car washes. I won't say we won't mind, because we will mind. Spending all our spare time trying to bootstrap our way to keeping the lights on will take us away from our actual mission in a way that none of us is in favor of. But even so, the majority of us are imbued with a tediously plucky can-do spirit, and holding a talent show or a rummage sale to stave off our creditors will probably soothe an ache in our souls that we don't even recognize.

There are people who want to loop us in with the ATI Management Bureau, never mind that those patriarchal old scholars never thought we were worth noticing. They didn't even really document Collodi. There's no way they would have noticed Williams. Besides which, we're not the sort of things they work with. We're the sort of things they spend their careers struggling to prevent.

We're stories, of a sort. Very personal, very specific stories, leaking into the world that they try to keep buttoned-down and neatly sorted, never allowing it to collapse into magic and chaos. The ATI folks don't want us, because if they got us, they'd be forced to try and shut us down.

So the Department of Children's Welfare's Manifestation and Management Division remains independent, and we do what we can to care for the children who fund us as much as your tax dollars do.

We try to save them, because they've already saved us.

#

I was moving slow, and only getting slower. Doug was not only waiting at the car by the time I arrived, he had had the time to start the engine, roll down the windows, and fold back the convertible roof, accurately assuming that in my current condition, driving in a convertible would feel more natural to me. He smiled with relief when he saw me step into the parking garage, but he didn't try to help me the last few yards to the car. He knew better. We'd been partners long enough that that.

If I had the build of a fashion model who'd discovered CrossFit and croissants after her retirement, he had the body of a linebacker who truly believed that one day the NFL would realize they'd made a mistake by benching him, and call him back to active play. We made a funny pair in the front of the convertible, but not as funny a pair as we'd make a trio once our last team member made her way out to the car.

I glanced at the time on the dashboard. Three-thirty. We only had an hour or so before the situation was likely to change again, and I don't like going into emotionally charged situations unprepared. "Doug, where's Gigi?"

"She was finishing her break when I told her we had a field task to complete," he said. "She should be here any minute."

"Did you tell her it was urgent?"

"She was finishing her break," he said, like that was all the answer I needed. And in a way, it was. For Gigi, break time was an adult form of recess, and recess was sacred. Flexibility isn't just about joints and bones. It's also about ways of thinking. Gigi was the least flexible of us all, which made sense, since she was the only one who'd needed to adjust to the idea of having bones. Still, I wished her adjustments could stretch to include knowing when she needed to prioritize something above playing tetherball and watching videos on social media. It would have been nice to know that we could change directions quickly.

I leaned back in my seat, fighting the urge to fidget, to keep checking every one of my joints to be sure that they still worked. It wouldn't make any difference. There was only one thing I could do to slow the stiffening once it began.

I had to check on Kendra.

The door from the stairwell slammed open, and Gigi came lumbering into the garage. As always, her head was low, giving her posture an ursine cast. She was a mountain of a woman, nearly seven feet tall, broad across the shoulders and thick around the waist, with arms like tree trunks and legs to match, all of it shoved into a pastel pink pantsuit that suited her remarkably well, for all that she moved like a grizzly bear that had been forced into a nine-to-five job. Which was, in many ways, exactly what she was, minus the "forced." Like all of us, Gigi was with the department willingly, even if it wasn't her first choice for an occupation.

I feel bad for the bears sometimes. Fashion dolls, like me, can get jobs as nannies or au pairs when we want to keep an eye on the children, staying close if that's what makes us happy. The department will help them falsify credentials, and they generally excel at those jobs, genuinely putting the comfort and safety of their charges ahead of anything else. Troll dolls like Doug have more trouble, but if they get involved with youth sports, they can at least stay close enough to know what's going on. Bears, though...humans judge on appearances without even realizing that they're doing it. They look at you, and in a glance they decide whether you're the season's hot new toy or a shelf-warmer destined for the landfill.

We do it too. How could we not? We are what we were built to be, and we were built to be companions. Bears like Gigi don't get a lot of options, because they're built like the generic button men from a bad mob drama, and there's no weight loss plan or surgery that changes that for them. A lot of them wind up doing government work, just because working for people who understand the situation can sand a lot of the rough edges off.

Gigi was a bouncer for a strip club before she signed on with us. She worked with a lot of my "sisters," some of them from the same batch lot, and the only real adjustment issue she had when she joined the team was figuring out that she didn't need to wait for me to start taking my clothes off.

She plodded over to the car and climbed into the back seat, causing the whole thing to sink. After a moment, her seatbelt clicked, and Doug hit the gas.

I closed my eyes and tried to hold on.

#

A lot of us, when we finish waking all the way up, pack our things and head as far away as we can get from wherever we started. It's the flip side of the ones I mentioned, who try to get jobs that let them stay exactly where they are: if we can't be what we were, we want to run. It's the first time we've been free to do so, and so we seize the opportunity with both hands. We go and we keep going.

Not me. Once I understood my options, I found the office closest to my birthplace and settled in where I could keep an eye on Kendra. I couldn't protect her the way I used to, but I could protect her in a new way, a way that she'd made possible by loving me as much as she had, by keeping me close and telling me all her secrets. She'd felt safe enough to do that, because she'd known that plastic lips could never tell another soul.

Even when my smile had sagged and softened into something less frozen, I'd kept the silent promise I made to her back then. I had never told another living soul the things she whispered to me in the darkness of her bedroom, and I never would. My supervisors knew some of it--they'd figured it out from other reports, and from the way I'd been found, naked and screaming in the landfill, desperately trying to claw my way back to a home that couldn't belong to me any longer. Our stories repeat, over and over again, predictable as the dawn, impossibly different as falling leaves. Our origins are our tale types, and if those ATI nerds can't classify us the way they want to, that's not our problem.

The children are our problem.

Doug kept his foot pressed down hard, speeding through the streets in a way that would have gotten us into a lot of trouble if not for the government plates on our car. Gigi's presence probably also helped. Traffic cops usually don't want to tangle with a car that clearly decided to put the top down so that one of the passengers would fit inside.

Even with as fast as we were going, my elbows no longer bent by the time we pulled up in front of the apartment building. Gigi had to help me out of the car, her massive hands as gentle as they always were. Doug hurried ahead, opening the door and holding it for us until we could make our way up the path to join him.

Kendra's family lived in one of those crappy brown apartment complexes that looked shabby and faded five minutes after it was painted. The windows were unbroken, but streaked on the outside with cheap soap, and about half of them were grimy on the inside, glass fogged and blurring the industrial canvas curtains that obscured the rooms beyond. Inside, the hallways smelled faintly of boiled cabbage and human urine, under a veil of carpet cleaner, even though the floor was tile.

Stepping through that door was grimly like coming home, and also like returning to a place I had sworn never to go again. My lungs seized as I crossed the threshold, and for a moment it was like someone had wrapped spectral fingers around them, squeezing until I could no longer breathe.

The pressure passed. I coughed and started to breathe again. Gigi looked at me with concern before asking, in a deceptively high, sweet voice, "Are you all right?"

I gestured to Doug rather than trying to answer. He nodded. "She'll be fine," he said. "This always happens when we have to come here."

Gigi looked unsure, but didn't argue, and together we made our way down the hall to a door that looked just like all the other doors around it, faded paint and scratched-up brass fittings, peephole so clouded with age and damage that it barely showed more than movement in the hall outside. Doug was the one to knock. When we had to come, Doug was always the one to knock.

There was a long, terrible pause before we heard locks being undone, and the door creaked open. Just a few inches, wide enough to show one suspicious blue eye, fringed in lashes caked with cheap mascara.

"Department of Children's Welfare, ma'am," said Doug, flashing his badge. "May we have a moment of your time?"

The door creaked wider open, and Kendra's mother slipped through, shutting it quickly behind her. "We didn't call you."

"We've had an anonymous report, and we're here to do a health and wellness check on your daughter." Doug managed to make a simple statement sound utterly banal and completely terrifying at the same time. It was a neat trick.

"Kendra's napping."

I couldn't call her out on the lie. Kendra's mother didn't know who I was, or what any of us were. According to the records, she never had a Williams of her own, or she'd recognize us, even if only in the abstract. But no, she never loved anything enough to bring it to life.

Not even her own daughter. Kendra had gestated in this woman's womb, but she'd brought herself to life with sheer determination, building a body one bone and blood vessel at a time. Her mother gave her life like it was a conditional thing. Kendra snatched it away and refused to give it back.

"Be that as it may, ma'am, you do have to let us in to check on her."

"Don't you need a warrant for that?" Her voice was getting shrill.

"Would you like us to call the police?" asked Gigi, politely. "I'm sure they'll be fascinated to know why you refused three known and identified government agents into your apartment. I'm sure it wouldn't cause you any additional trouble."

Kendra's mother froze, eyes darting back and forth as she did the math of her predicament: let the government agency that only cared about the condition of her daughter through the door, or summon the police, who would probably care about things like controlled substances and alcohol.

"She's in the bedroom at the end of the hall," said the woman, stepping out of the way and pushing the door open for them.

"Thank you, ma'am," said Doug.

The trio entered the apartment. She didn't follow them. It was bad this time, then: I had already known it had to be, with the way that I was stiffening up, but leaving us alone in the apartment was as good as an admission that she was planning to disappear. Kendra's father had been the one to buy me for her, way back in the before-times, and he was long dead and gone. With her mother out of the picture, she would be all alone in the world.

Except for me. And I wasn't going anywhere.

The apartment was filthy enough to make the hall outside look pristine. We made our way unerringly down the hall to Kendra's room, which was dingy white and as scuffed as everything around it. I pushed past Doug and Gigi to be the first to open the door.

The room on the other side was small and dark and cluttered, and achingly familiar. Nothing had changed in the last two years. Kendra was older now, twelve instead of ten, but she still had the same toys, the same plush companions, the same cardboard box dollhouse pushed up against the closet door. I stopped in the doorway, my breath catching in my throat, and looked around with wide, unblinking eyes. I knew those plush toys, and I knew those hard-loved dolls. I searched their faces one by one, searching for a sign that any of them were starting to wake up, but didn't find it. That wasn't that unusual. Most children never manage to awaken one of us. Two is rare. Three or more is all but unheard of.

Kendra was a lump under the covers. I approached carefully. "Kendra? Honey? It's Angie."

She didn't move.

I drew closer, leaning stiffly down to pull the blankets back and press one rigid hand against her forehead. Then I recoiled. "Doug, she's burning up!"

He swore.

#

It was Gigi, not Doug, who carried Kendra out of that apartment. Doug helped me fill a suitcase with the things she would have missed most two years ago, and which I hoped would still bring her comfort now. My hands weren't working right, so he carried it with him as he followed Gigi and Kendra out.

I paused to take one last look around the room that had once been my home, where I had come to slow and terrible consciousness before fleeing to look for help that had never come, and in the quiet, I heard the crying coming from the closet.

"Hello?"

The closet had no door--of course it didn't--and when I swept away the mound of dirty laundry blocking it, I found a little girl, younger than Kendra, wearing a tattered sundress I recognized as one Kendra had grown out of several years before and crying into her knees.

"Hello," I said again. "Have we met?"

She lifted her head, sniffling, and said in a voice thick with snot and tears, "Once."

"Once, huh? I don't remember you." Only maybe I did, because her hair was gray, like the fur of a plush mouse Kendra had gotten for the birthday before I woke up and went away. What did she name the mouse, what did she... "Brie?"

"She said it sounded like a girl's name, so that's what she called me. I'd come out, but my legs are all soft and bendy, and I can't walk so good since she got sick."

"Has she been sick for long?"

Brie timidly held up three fingers. I resisted the urge to punch a wall.

"All right, honey. Here's what we're going to do..."

#

Neither Gigi nor Doug looked surprised when I came walking stiffly out of the building with a gray-haired little girl weeping in my arms. Gigi looked at the girl with approval, smiling a little. She still had Kendra curled in her lap.

Doug helped buckle me and Brie in, and then we were off to the hospital. Kendra was sick, but we could give her a chance to get better. She gave us our lives. The least we could do was save hers.

Brie cried the whole way, and I held her tight, two toys brought to life by the love of a child, fading beside her, but still doing our best to bring her home.

We weren't ready to be put away.