Kit did not sleep. She lay in the dark until the sky outside her window turned the color of wet paper, and then she got up, and she did what she always did when she didn't know what to do: she counted.
Twenty-six jars on the shelf. She counted them twice. Twenty-six. But when she held each one up to the light, three of them were dark. Not empty, exactly — there was still a faint shimmer at the bottom of each one, like the last spoonful of something sweet — but dark the way a room is dark after someone has left it. Three jars, gone dim overnight. The oldest jar, the one labeled JUNE 12, FIRST MOONLIGHT, was the dimmest of all.
Kit put the jars back, one by one, with shaking hands. She took the dark blue button out of her pajama pocket. It was still warm. It had been warm all night.
"Okay," she said to the button. "You're coming with me."
She put the button in the pocket of her jeans, next to her phone and her house key. She went downstairs. Her mother was in the kitchen, just home from the night shift at the hospital, standing at the counter in her scrubs with a mug of tea going cold in her hands. Her mother was a nurse. She worked nights and slept days, and Kit had gotten used to having the house to herself in the evenings, and her mother to herself in the mornings, and the two of them passing each other like ships in the hallway.
"You're up early," her mother said.
"Couldn't sleep," Kit said. She poured herself a glass of orange juice. She did not say anything about the moon. She did not say anything about the button. Her grandmother had told her, the night before she died: if the moon ever looks wrong, tell someone. But her mother was so tired, and the words wouldn't come out right, and Kit was afraid that if she said it out loud — the moon is disappearing — her mother would look at her the way she looked at patients who were confused, with that gentle, professional concern that meant she didn't believe them.
"Eat something," her mother said. "You look pale."
Kit ate half a piece of toast. She went to school. The whole way there, she kept finding things. A button on the front steps. A hairpin on the sidewalk. A single glove — right-handed, gray wool — in the gutter. It was like the whole town was shedding, like everything loose was coming undone at once. Kit picked up the button and the hairpin and put them in her pocket with the dark blue one. She left the glove. She had enough gloves.
At school, Kit couldn't concentrate. In first period, her history teacher talked about the moon landing, and Kit stared out the window at a sky that was empty and blue and wrong, and she thought about the fact that nobody had ever told her the moon could disappear. They had told her it could be full, and new, and crescent, and half. They had never told her it could be gone.
At lunch, Kit sat alone, the way she usually did, at the end of the long table by the windows, with her sandwich and her book. And that was when she saw the girl with the sketchbook.
The girl was new. Kit had seen her around for about a week — tall, quiet, with dark hair cut short and a green jacket that was too big for her. She sat two tables away, alone, with a sketchbook open in front of her, drawing something with fierce concentration. Kit watched her for a while, the way you watch someone when you don't want them to know you're watching, and then the girl looked up, right at Kit, and Kit looked down at her sandwich very fast.
"You're staring," the girl said. She didn't sound angry. She sounded tired.
"Sorry," Kit said.
"It's okay. I'm used to it. I'm the new girl. Everyone stares." The girl closed her sketchbook, stood up, and came over to Kit's table, and sat down across from her without asking. "I'm Wren," she said. "Wren Okafor. I moved here last week from a town you've never heard of."
"Kit," Kit said. "Kit Marlowe."
Wren nodded. She opened her sketchbook again, turned it around so Kit could see it, and Kit's heart stopped.
The page was full of moons. Dozens of them, drawn in pencil, one after another, in rows. And each moon was smaller than the one before it. The first one was big and round and full. The last one was barely a dot, a speck of pencil on white paper, like a star that had forgotten how to shine.
"You see it too," Wren said. It wasn't a question.
Kit didn't answer for a long time. She looked at the moons in the sketchbook, and she thought about her thumbnail, and the empty jar, and the warm button in her pocket.
"How long?" Kit asked, finally.
"Three weeks," Wren said. "In my old town, it took three weeks. The moon got smaller every night, a little at a time, and then one night it was just... gone. Not like a new moon. Gone. The sky was empty. And everyone acted like it had always been empty. Like they'd forgotten it was ever there."
"Forgot?" Kit said.
"That's the worst part," Wren said. She turned the page. There was another drawing — a street, at night, with people walking under a sky with no moon, and none of them looking up. "When the moon went out in my town, people stopped wishing. Not all at once. A little at a time. First they stopped wishing on stars, because what's the point of wishing on a star when the moon is gone? Then they stopped wishing on birthdays. Then they stopped wishing at all. My mother said the town just... went quiet. Like someone had turned the volume down on the whole place."
Kit reached into her pocket. She took out the dark blue button. She put it on the table between them. It was still warm.
"Do you know what this is?" she asked.
Wren picked it up. She held it between her thumb and finger, the way Kit had held it last night. "It's a wish," she said. "A warm one. Somebody made it recently, and they meant it, and they haven't forgotten it yet. That's why it's still warm. The cold ones are the forgotten ones."
"How do you know that?" Kit asked.
"Because my grandmother told me," Wren said. "And because I've been collecting them too."
Wren reached into her own pocket, and she took out a handful of things — a button, a bead, a paperclip bent into the shape of a star — and she put them on the table next to Kit's button. They were all cold. Kit touched one. It was cold as a stone from a river.
"They're everywhere now," Wren said. "All over town. The lost things are coming out of the walls. It's like the town is trying to tell us something, and it doesn't know how."
After school, Kit and Wren walked home together, and they didn't talk much, and that was fine, because Kit had spent her whole life not talking much, and Wren seemed to understand that. They walked past the grocery store, past the bus stop, past the park with the broken swing, and Kit kept finding things — a button on the curb, a marble in the grass — and Wren kept picking them up too, and by the time they got to Kit's street, both of their pockets were full.
"Tomorrow," Wren said, "meet me at the hill behind the school. At midnight. Bring your jars."
"My jars?" Kit said.
"The moonlight ones," Wren said. "Bring the brightest one you have. And bring the button. The warm one."
"Why midnight?" Kit asked.
"Because that's when the door opens," Wren said. "The door in the hill. It only opens when the moon is thin enough to fit through the keyhole."
Kit stared at her. "There's a door in the hill?"
"There's always been a door in the hill," Wren said. "You just never noticed it, because you were never looking for it. I noticed it on my first day here. It's behind the old oak, where the ground goes soft. You'll see it. Bring a flashlight."
Wren walked away, down the street, her green jacket too big for her, her pockets full of cold wishes. Kit stood on the sidewalk and watched her go, and then she looked up at the sky, where the sun was going down, and she thought about the moon, which would be up soon, smaller than it was last night, smaller than it would ever be again.
That night, Kit set out her jars on the windowsill, the way she always did. But this time, she set out only one — the oldest jar, the one labeled JUNE 12, FIRST MOONLIGHT, the one her grandmother had caught with her on the back porch when she was seven. The shimmer inside it was faint now, barely there, like a candle about to go out. Kit held it up to the window, to the thin, pale moon, and she whispered, "Hang on. I'm coming."
At midnight, Kit climbed out her bedroom window with the jar in her backpack and the dark blue button in her pocket, and she ran through the sleeping town to the hill behind the school, where Wren was already waiting, with a flashlight and a sketchbook and a face that said she hadn't slept either.
And there it was. The door in the hill. A small wooden door, set into the earth behind the old oak, with a brass handle shaped like a crescent moon, and a keyhole that glowed faintly silver, like moonlight was leaking through it from the other side.
Wren put her hand on the handle. She looked at Kit. "Ready?"
Kit thought about her grandmother. She thought about the tin box under her bed. She thought about the twenty-six jars on the shelf, and the three that had gone dark, and the button in her pocket, warm as a heartbeat.
"Ready," Kit said.
Wren turned the handle. The door opened. And inside, lit by a light that had no source, was a long room, with shelves from floor to ceiling, and on every shelf, jars. Thousands of jars. Jars of moonlight, all of them, lined up in perfect rows, each one labeled with a name in faded ink.
Kit stepped inside. She walked down the rows, reading the names. Some of them she knew — the names of people in Graywater, people she had gone to school with, people who worked at the grocery store. Some of them she didn't know. And then, on the nearest shelf, at exactly her eye level, she found it.
A jar, labeled in neat, careful handwriting she had never seen before.
KIT.
Kit reached for it with a shaking hand. The jar was empty.
And behind her, a voice said, very quietly, "You're early. I wasn't expecting you for another three nights."
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