Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

“Breathe,” she said. “You need to breathe.”

There was a commotion behind her. She didn’t turn. She knew what she would see: two people who didn’t swim enough staggering out of the waves, with a skeleton following close behind. When that had become the new normal, she couldn’t possibly have said.

Christopher coughed again before his head snapped up, eyes widening in alarm. Cora sighed.

“It’s in your hand,” she said. “You didn’t drop it. I wouldn’t let you.”

He looked down, relaxing slightly when he saw the flute. He still didn’t speak.

Cora sat back on her calves, knees folded beneath her, sticky pink liquid soaking every inch of her, and for the first time since leaving the Trenches, she felt almost content. She felt almost like she was home. Turning, she told Kade and Rini, “He’s going to be all right.”

“Thank God,” said Kade. “Aunt Eleanor will forgive me for Nadya deciding to stay behind in an Underworld that might border on her own, but she wouldn’t forgive me for a drowning.”

“Why wouldn’t he have been all right?” asked Rini. “It’s just sugar.”

“People who don’t come from here can die if they breathe too much liquid,” said Cora. “It’s called ‘drowning.’”

Rini looked alarmed. “What a dreadful world you have. I wouldn’t want to live in a place where mothers die and people can’t breathe the sea.”

“Yeah, well, you work with what you have,” muttered Cora, thinking about pills and pools and drownings. She turned back to Christopher. “Feel like you can get up?”

He nodded, still silently. Leaning forward, Cora hooked her hands under his arms and stood, pulling him along with her, providing the leverage he needed to get his feet back under himself. Christopher coughed one more time, pressing a hand to the base of his throat.

“Burns,” he rasped.

“That’s the carbonation,” said Cora. “Don’t breathe soda. Don’t breathe water either, unless you’re built for it. Chlorine fucks you up pretty bad too. It’ll pass.”

Christopher nodded, lowering his hand and letting it join its partner in gripping the bone flute, which was already dry and didn’t appear to have been stained by its passage through an infinity of pink dye.

The same couldn’t be said for the rest of them. Kade’s formerly white shirt was now a pleasant shade of pink, and Rini’s dress was less “melting sherbet” and more “strawberry smoothie.” Cora had been wearing dark colors, but her white socks weren’t anymore. Even Sumi glittered with tiny beads of pink liquid, like jewels in the sun.

“This just keeps getting weirder and I’m not sure I like it,” muttered Cora.

Kade gave her a sympathetic look before running a hand back over his hair, releasing a sticky wave of soda. “Try not to think about it too hard. We don’t know how much logic this place can handle, and if it starts trying to break us because we’re applying too many rules, we’re going to have a problem.” He turned to Rini. “We’re on your home turf now. Where do we go to find your mother’s nonsense? We’re going to need that if we want to put her back together.”

Cora swallowed a cascade of giggles. They would have sounded hysterical, she knew: they would have sounded like she could no longer cope. And that wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. She was a solid, practical person, and while she had accepted the existence of magic—sort of hard not to, under the circumstances—there was a lot of ground between “magic is real, other worlds are real, mermaids can be real, in a world that wants them” and “everything is real, women fall out of the sky into turtle ponds, skeletons walk, and we left my best friend in the underworld.”

When she got back to the school, she was going to draw herself a hot bath, curl up in the tub, and sleep for days.

“This is the Strawberry Sea,” said Rini uncomfortably, looking around. “The Meringue Mountains are to the west, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain is to the east. If we chart a course between them, through the Fondant Forests, we should come to the farmlands. That’s where my home is. There’s where my mother’s supposed to be. If her nonsense were going to go anywhere, it would probably go there.”

“Just how Nonsense is this world, Rini?” asked Kade. “None of us went to nonsensical places, and Nonsense, it tends to reject what doesn’t belong inside of it. We tend to haul logic in our wake, like dirt on our shoes.”

“I don’t understand,” said Rini.

“If people don’t normally drown when they breathe water here, and Christopher almost drowned, that’s logic seeping in,” said Kade. “We need to fix your mother and get out of here before the world decides to shove us out.”

“Where would we go?” asked Cora.