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.