by Emma Savant
“Well, bully for them,” I said.
My voice was too loud. Several startled workers looked up at me and then quickly back down at their work.
I lowered my tone. “Felix, there’s got to be another way out of here.”
He frowned at me. A frown didn’t look natural on his face.
“Santa’s not keeping you here because he wants to,” he said. “It’s not out of malice or anything. The sleigh just really is the only way in or out.”
“That can’t be true,” I said. “What if you all have an emergency?”
“We have emergency services,” he said. “Our hospital’s one of the best in the hemisphere.”
“Or what if you run out of food?” I said. “It’s not like you can grow much of your own here.”
He grinned. “You haven’t seen our hydroponic farms.”
“Your what?”
“We grow almost all of our own food,” he said. “It’s not like it’s hard.”
They probably had magic helping them along. How did I keep forgetting about the magic?
“Most of us never need to leave the North Pole,” he said. “There’s not much reason to leave unless you’re helping with Christmas deliveries.”
“You’ve gotten out, though?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah. Didn’t see anywhere I’d rather live than here.”
I jabbed another teddy bear in the face.
“It’s really important that people don’t just come and go whenever they want,” he said. “Even our summer tour groups come in and out on the sleigh. We have to keep the North Pole safe.”
“From what?” I said. “Rogue penguins?”
“That’s the South Pole,” he said.
This conversation was as pointless as the rest of my life. I worked in silence and, to my surprise, Felix didn’t say anything. Not to me, anyway. He could only handle about thirty seconds of not talking at all and ended up in a lively conversation with the woman across from us about some game I didn’t recognize—something with orbs and wands. I didn’t ask.
After a while, the brown bears gave way to purple ones, and the workers passed bowls of bright blue glass eyes down the line. I picked up one of the new bears and started sewing.
“So you’re Holly,” the woman next to me said. I looked up, and realized she was staring at me with interest, and probably had been for a while.
“News travels.”
“Faster than you’d believe. I’m Joy. This is Nate.”
Her bright red, wildly curling hair was held back with both a ponytail and a headband, and she had freckles and a pointed nose. Nate was the one who’d smirked at me earlier. He had wavy hair and the kind of scruff that was more than a five o’ clock shadow but less than a beard.
“Welcome,” he said.
“You doing okay?” Joy said.
I held up my purple teddy bear for her inspection. “I think I’ve got the hang of it?”
She giggled. “Not your bear. You. Are you doing okay?”
I opened my mouth, then swallowed and shrugged. She was asking, really asking, and I didn’t know why it made me feel choked up.
Clearly, I was more than a little sleep-deprived.
“I’m good,” I said after a minute. “As good as I can be.”
“Listen, do you want to go out with us after work?” she said. “A few of us were planning on getting drinks and probably some deep fried junk after our shift. We’d love for you to join us.”
She seemed nice, like the kind of person who invited social pariahs out for drinks before she bothered to ask anyone else if they were okay with some idiot crashing their party.
I looked at Nate. He grinned.
“Come on,” he said. “It’ll be fun. Get you out of the Workshop.”
“Um, yeah, then,” I said. “Yeah, I guess. Thanks.”
“Not The Lantern,” Felix cut in. “I’ve still got a hangover from that nasty cinnamon vodka.”
“You’re not supposed to drink the whole bottle,” Nate said. “You’re one floe short of an iceberg.”
Felix flipped him off with a grin.
I downed another two cups of caffeine at lunch and stayed mostly silent while I listened to the elves banter about work and gossip and some concert a bunch of them had attended.
They were elves, I realized. Real ones, but nothing like the tiny, childish creatures I knew from storybooks. They were adults, and nice—the kind of people I could almost imagine having as friends, if I weren’t the kind of socially awkward hermit who couldn’t hold onto friends.
After lunch, we sewed purple eyes onto blue teddy bears and black eyes onto fluffy plush rabbits. Finally, the supervisor rang a bell and the conveyor shuddered to a halt. Everyone jumped up like class had just let out. I stood back as they all bustled around, returning glass eyes into a massive jar in a cabinet and sweeping up loose threads.
My back was killing me. I couldn’t imagine how I was supposed to do this day after day.
Felix nudged my shoulder.
“Grab your jacket and meet us in the Workshop lobby in half an hour,” he said.
“Your drinks are on me,” Joy added.
I still had the map and only turned one wrong corner, arriving in the lobby a few minutes late. A group of five people was already there, and the ones I hadn’t already met looked at me as I arrived with unabashed curiosity on their faces.
Joy looped her arm through mine, almost protectively.
We walked out of the lobby and onto the Workshop’s front plaza. My breath rose up in a cloud in front of me. The plaza led to a walkway that was lined in Christmas trees and lampposts that were striped with fat and thin gold lines. They looked like glittering candy canes, which I had no doubt was intentional.
I stopped, pulled my free hand out from where I had it snugly in my pocket, and tested the air.
“What?” Joy said.
“I thought it would be colder,” I said.
“Oh, it is,” she said. “The entire dome has a charm on it. Otherwise we’d all turn into snowmen every time we came outside.”
I looked up. I couldn’t see a dome, but then Joy held her gloved hand up and waved it across the sky. A translucent barrier shimmered above us like the skin of a bubble, then faded back into a black sky loaded with stars.
The whole group moved down the walkway, which seemed to be sloping gently upward. We finally crested the hill, and I stopped dead.
Joy smiled and let me look.
Beyond the gates that surrounded the Workshop lay a sparkling city. It was bigger than I’d expected, and busier, and so lovely it took my breath away.
Many of the buildings looked like they were carved out of gleaming ice; others were built of blue snow that reflected the glow of the city lights. Glass-walled sky bridges arced between buildings, and the roads were busy with lights.
Beneath everything, the ground was icy white, and the ground beyond the city gave way to black water. In the distance, other, smaller groups of buildings floated on their own large ice floes.
“Whoa,” I said.
Felix stood at my elbow.
“What do you think?”
I took in the glittering skyscape and the dazzling display of bright stars that wheeled above it. Everything about this seemed impossible in a way that was just right.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Well, look at that!” he said.
“What?”
“She’s not relentlessly negative about everything all the time!” he said.
I rolled my eyes at him. “I did get run over yesterday. It’s not like you actually know me.”
“Yeah, give her a break,” Nate said. He winked at me.
Beneath us, the lights of the city flickered together as though they were all on one electric switch that was on the fritz. Joy tensed. Another elf I hadn’t met looked nervously around, but Nate and Felix and the rest seemed unconcerned.
The lights flickered back on. Joy let out a
breath.
I looked around, waiting for someone to offer an explanation.
“Weird,” Joy said.
She shrugged it off, then held tight to my arm and marched us past Nate and Felix and down the hill toward the city.
Chapter 8
To my surprise, it only took a week or so before I found myself getting used to life at the North Pole.
I hadn’t expected it to feel so normal so quickly. I hadn’t expected it to feel normal ever, and discovering that I’d gotten used to sewing eyes on stuffed animals as quickly as I’d gotten used to bagging groceries was almost unsettling.
I still wasn’t great at my job, but then, I wasn’t great at much of anything. It didn’t seem to matter. The elves were fascinated by me, and if I was destroying their toys, they were too nice to say anything about it.
I didn’t see Santa again for a while, but I did see Joy and Nate every day, and Felix almost as often.
Joy was intrigued by my life “down south,” as she called it. I told her about my job and Eloise and the tourists that descended on the town every winter. She listened, entranced, as though my tedious life was actually worth knowing about.
“And you have people visit you from all over the world?” she said one day. “Just for the mountains?”
“You have visitors too,” I said. “I saw a brochure about tours.”
She shook her head. “They’re not here for the climate,” she said. “The Workshop’s the big draw. But your town is different. People go there to enjoy the landscape.”
“I guess so,” I said. “I’m still getting used to you not having much of a landscape here. You don’t even have land.”
Knowing there was no soil below me for probably hundreds of feet made me feel unsteady, still, even though I’d never have known we were sitting on ice and water if Felix hadn’t told me. The iceberg under the domed city was so enormous that it might as well have been an island.
“You’ve never left the North Pole?” I said.
“Nope,” Joy said. She’d already worked through her bowl of pink plastic noses, so she scooped a handful from mine and started stitching it to the toy cat on her lap. “I was born here. Never had a reason to leave.”
“Do you guys only leave with Santa?” I said. “What about traveling just for fun?”
The supervisor cleared her throat and raised her eyebrows at me. I jumped back to work. The noses were harder to sew on than the eyes, and the cats looked more lifelike than the teddy bears had. It was hard to totally escape the feeling that I was about to get busted for animal cruelty.
“Some people travel,” Joy said, a note of wistfulness in her voice. “I just haven’t. Not yet.”
The door opened, and the atmosphere in the room changed abruptly. Several elves sat up straighter and conversations tapered off.
I turned to see Noelle standing in the doorway with a clipboard.
“I’ve got a reassignment,” she said over everyone’s heads to the supervisor, who nodded. Noelle scanned the room, and her eyes landed on me. “Holly,” she said.
My stomach dropped.
I didn’t want a reassignment. I hadn’t wanted this first assignment, but now that I was settled here I definitely wasn’t ready for another one.
I set my unfinished cat on my seat and went over to her.
“I’m doing fine here,” I said in a low voice.
Noelle checked something off on her clipboard and glanced up at me.
“I know,” she said. “That’s why you’re getting moved somewhere a little more interesting.”
“This is interesting,” I lied.
Noelle didn’t answer. Instead, she tucked her pen behind her ear, turned, and waved me to follow her.
I looked back. Joy made a face and mouthed, See you later.
Noelle led me to a new wing of the snowflake-shaped Workshop. This one was bustling, with elves darting in and out of doors and wheeling racks of clothing up and down the hall. A woman with a high brown bun stood in the hallway with a tape measure around her neck, barking orders at a few young elves who stood around her.
“This is the House of Claus,” Noelle said.
We walked past the group and to a large black door that said Office in silver letters. She pushed it open and waved me in.
An older woman with a tousled white pixie cut sat on a desk with her phone tucked between her ear and shoulder and a bundle of fabric between her hands.
“I know the dye job came out weird,” she said. “I still want the dupioni. We’ll make it work. Handmade irregularities are trendy. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, bye.”
She hung up the phone and swiveled toward us.
“You must be Holly,” she said.
I nodded and held out a hand. She shook it without getting off the desk.
“We haven’t had a full-blown human here in ages,” she said. “Good to meet you. I’m Mary.”
“I’ve got the couture team working on the blouses,” Noelle said over me. “Infant wear is still working on the terrycloth onesies and probably won’t switch to knits for another day or two.”
“That’s still on schedule, though?”
“Ahead.”
“Oh, good for us.”
The woman unwrapped a chocolate mint from a bowl on her desk and offered me one. I shook my head. She handed Noelle a small stack of papers.
“Approvals for the teen slogans,” she said. “You can get back to work.” She smiled at me, her teeth white and her smile warm. “I think Holly and I are going to get along just fine.”
She had no reason to think that, just like I had no reason to know whether or not I’d get along with her.
“I didn’t mind working on the stuffed animals,” I said.
“I’m sure you didn’t, but that job is boring as getting socks for Christmas,” she said. “Besides, I could really use the perspective of someone who lives outside the Pole.”
She hopped off the desk and tossed me a mint. I caught it, just barely.
“Stick it in your pocket,” Mary said. “Maybe you’ll want it later.”
She led me out of her office. Noelle went one way and we went the other. I stayed a few steps behind Mary and watched her closely.
The elves in the stuffed animal room had all straightened up and gotten quiet when Noelle had showed up. Around this new person, everyone seemed to have the opposite reaction. There were smiles and waves, and more than one person called out, “How’s it going?” She waved back at everyone and responded with things like, “Better than ever!” or “Not as good as your sweater! You should wear that shade of purple every day, darling.”
The curious stares I was starting to become accustomed to were no less blatant here. I caught people nudging and whispering to each other as we passed, but no one said anything to me.
“I’m going to have you on outfit assembly and packaging,” Mary said over her shoulder. “How’s your eye for fashion?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Normal?”
“Oh, good, the touch of the everywoman.”
She led me through a door and into a room filled with half-dressed, faceless mannequins and long tables loaded with heaps of clothing and stacks of papers.
A short elf wearing a red-and-white polka-dotted apron tossed an armful of clothes on the table and waved brightly at Mary. Her blond hair was twisted into a bun that was held in place by two pink knitting needles.
“We’re making good progress on the nine-to-twelves!” she chirped.
“I knew you’d have it covered.” Mary pushed me gently in front of her. “This is Holly. She’s going help with outfit assembly. Holly, meet Lucy.”
“The Humdrum!” Lucy exclaimed. “Oh, man, I didn’t think we’d even see her over here.”
She held out her hand, and I shook it. Her hand was tiny but gripped mine like a vice.
“Super happy to have you here. Have you worked in fashion before?”
“No.”
“Awesome,” she exclaimed, like
this was the answer she’d been hoping for. “You’ll learn all sorts of new skills.”
Mary wiggled her fingers at us and left.
There were other people in the room, carrying piles of clothes or dressing mannequins. A slender man wrapped a red scarf around a short child mannequin and stepped back with his head tilted.
“You were right,” the woman next to him said. “The orange was better.”
They fist-bumped. The man traded out the red scarf for an orange one, then lifted the mannequin onto a short rolling cart and wheeled it out of the room through a side door.
“This is the best job in the whole Workshop,” Lucy said, walking to one of the long tables. “If you played with dolls as a little kid, you already know what to do.”
She pushed a short stack of papers toward me. The pages were held together by a gold binder clip, and the top showed several pictures of a pre-teen girl above a description:
Profile: #1462
Age 10
Sporty, athletic, center of attention, high energy, low trend consciousness
Visual: Bright, colorful, prints okay, neons okay
Durability: High
The page under that featured another ten-year-old girl, Profile #1463, who was “focused, academically driven, moderate energy, animal lover.”
I flipped through the package. They were all ten and all girls.
“We’re almost done with these,” Lucy said. “Probably going to finish the girl tens tomorrow or the next day. Then it’s four days for the boy tens and probably an afternoon for the gender-nonconforming tens, and then we’re halfway done with this group!”
“How many do you have total?”
She pursed her lips and thought, then shrugged. “I’d have to check. Bazillions, basically.”
Bazillions. Great. I was going to die here.
Chapter 9
“So all you have to do is put together an outfit you think she’ll like, stick in on a mannequin for Packaging to reference, and then I’ll approve it and we’ll start bundling that ensemble up for everyone who fits that profile.”
“This isn’t an individual kid?” I said, holding up the photos of #1462.
