Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

“Yes, milord,” said Nancy, and turned to Nadya. “Follow me.”

The others stood, silently watching, as the girl who had left them to grace her master’s hall led Nadya the Drowned Girl away, toward the river, toward the future, whatever that future might entail. Neither of them looked back. Neither of them said goodbye. The shade-shrouded skeleton of Sumi was a patient reminder of why they had decided to meet this price, and of what it would have to redeem.

“Thank you, sir,” said Kade finally. “We’ll be going now.”

“Wait,” said Christopher.

The Lord of the Dead turned to him. “Yes, child of Mariposa?”

“I can pipe the bones of the dead out of the earth, and back in Mariposa, that’s enough: nothing’s missing. Something’s missing with Sumi. The nonsense didn’t come here, Nancy said. Where did it go?”

“The same place nonsense always goes,” said the Lord of the Dead. “It went home. Even when a door never opens during the lifetime of a wanderer, they find their rest after death.”

“Home…” said Kade slowly. He turned to Rini. “All right. Take us to Confection.”

Rini’s eyes lit up. She didn’t hesitate, just raised her bracelet to her mouth and bit off another bead, crunching loudly as she swallowed.

The door opened directly under their feet, swinging wide, and then they were falling, four living teenagers and one glimmering skeleton. Rini laughed all the way down. The door slammed shut behind them.

The Lord of the Dead looked at the place where it had been and sighed before waving his hand, sending the specks of light dancing around the room. The living were always in such a hurry. They would learn soon enough.

*

RINI’S DOOR HAD opened above what Cora would have called an ocean, had it not been bright pink and gently bubbling. Christopher curled into a ball as he fell, using his entire body to protect his flute. Kade fell like an amateur, all flailing limbs and panic. Rini was laughing, spinning wildly in the air, like she didn’t really believe that gravity would hurt her. Sumi’s skeleton merely dropped. Dead people probably didn’t worry too much about drowning.

Cora, once the surprise powerhouse of her school swim team, curved her body into a bow, arms stretched out in front of her, hands together, head tucked down to reduce the chances of her neck snapping on impact. That didn’t happen often. She didn’t often see divers leap from this height.

I’m flying, she thought giddily, and who cared if the sea below her was pink and the air around her smelled of sugar and strawberry syrup? Who cared? The school had a turtle pond and bathtubs big enough for her to sink down to her nose, only the small islands of her knees and the peak of her belly standing above the surface, but there was no pool, there was no ocean. She hadn’t been swimming since she’d left the Trenches, and every molecule of her body yearned for the moment when she would be surrounded by the sea.

They hit the surface all at the same time, Kade and Christopher with enormous splashes, Rini and Sumi with smaller ones, and Cora slicing through the surface of the waves like a harpoon, cutting down, down, down into the pink, bubbling depths.

She was the first to burst back into the air, the force of her mermaid-trained kicks driving her several feet above the pinkish foam as she sputtered and exclaimed, “It’s soda!”

Rini laughed as she came bobbing back up. “Strawberry rhubarb soda!” she cheered. One of her ears was gone, following her fingers into nothingness. She didn’t appear to have noticed. “We’re home, we’re home, we’re home in the foam!” She splashed Cora with her remaining hand, sending soda droplets in all directions.

Kade was sputtering when he surfaced. Sumi’s bones simply floated to the top, buoyant beyond all human measure.

Cora frowned. “Where’s Christopher?” she asked, looking at Kade.

“What do you mean?”

“I saw where everyone was when we were falling.” She had been the only one composed enough to check. The others had been panicking, or plummeting, not trying to get their bearings. She couldn’t blame them. Everyone’s lives prepared them for something different. “He was right next to you.”

Kade’s eyes widened. “I don’t know.”

There wasn’t time to keep talking: not if she wanted this to end well. Cora took a deep breath before she dove, wishing briefly that she had a hair tie, or better yet, that she had her gills.

The sea of strawberry rhubarb soda—and who did that? They were all going to get horrible urinary tract infections after this—was translucent, lighter than normal water. The bubbles stung her eyes, but she could deal with the pain. Chlorine was worse.