Chapter 18
Ribbon
Ribbon crawled from underneath the dresser and looked up at Shaunice. Her human was still in her chair, asleep with the side of her face on the desk.
She stared at the girl a moment, then flexed her cloth shoulders. She felt better than she had in years. For so long she had been starved of energy by Shaunice's lack of emotion, lack of imagination. Even before she became a teenager, the girl had treated life like a science experiment and it had left Ribbon cut off from the energy that most other dolls took for granted.
But the last few days had been different. Ribbon felt bad that her re-connection to Shaunice had been painful for the girl, but she had to admit that it felt good to have some interaction with her human. She missed the way Shaunice had been before the girl's mother had disappeared. The two of them had never had a strong connection the way Blink and his human Ash had, but it had been enough in those days. When Shaunice's mom left, some kind of door in the girl had seemed to close.
She stared up at her human and tried to remember what had happened earlier that day. She was so unused to getting feedback from Shaunice that it was hard to get a lock on things that happened during the day.
The images weren't clear, and she couldn't recall what was said, but Ribbon's ability had picked up something that day. She closed her button eyes and tried to feel it, but saw that there was nothing there. That was what had alarmed her. Shaunice had met someone today who didn't give off any emotions that Ribbon could pick up. She'd never met any doll or human who didn't give off any emotion. It worried her.
She climbed up onto the desk and looked out the window. The captain of the gatekeepers had called a curfew two nights ago, but she still expected to see some dolls out on the street. They had been told to stay close to their humans and not to go to Voodootown, but the dolls weren't good at taking orders. Some of them had to be out there somewhere. And some of them might want to know about the man that Ribbon had not been able to feel.
"See you, Shaunice," she said. "I'll try to make sure you have good dreams." She cracked the window open enough to squeeze under and jumped to the ground. She'd find Twister and the others. Twister had said she was going to try to figure out why so many dolls were disappearing. Ribbon hoped they would be able to make sense out of the human Shaunice had talked to that day.