Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

“That’s the sort of philosophical question that my aunt loves and I hate,” said Kade. “Maybe we’d go back to the school, or back to the Halls of the Dead, and get stuck hanging out watching Nancy play garden gnome forever. Or maybe we’d get knocked back through our doors.” His mouth was a thin, grim line. “Good for you. Not so good for me.”

Cora didn’t know all the circumstances of Kade’s door, but she knew enough to know that he was one of the only students who had no desire to go back. While the rest of them searched, he sat back and watched, content to know that the school would be his home for the rest of his life. That was good. Someone needed to keep the lighthouse fires burning, because there would always be lost children looking for the light. It was also terrible. No one should find the place where they belonged and then reject it.

“Confection is Confection,” said Rini, sounding confused. “Mom always said it was Nonsense, and then she’d laugh and kiss me and say, ‘But things still do what they do, and babies still get born.’”

“So it’s a Nonsense world with consistent internal rules,” said Kade, sounding relieved. “You’re probably near the border of Logic, or have a strong underpinning of Reason. Either way, we’re not likely to get spit out unless we start trying to deny the reality around us. No one talk about nutrition.”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” said Christopher.

Cora, who was slowly coming to realize that she was a fat girl in a world made entirely of cake—something the students at her old school would probably have called her deepest fantasy—said nothing as her cheeks flared red.

The five of them trudged along the crumble and sugar beach, moving toward the graham cracker and shortbread bedrock up ahead. Only Sumi seemed to have no trouble with the uneven ground: she was too light to sink into the sand, and walked blithely on the top of it, leaving bony footprints behind her. She was a strange double-exposure of an impossibility, rainbow skeleton and solemn black-and-white teen at the same time, and just looking at her was enough to make Cora shudder. Either of the images Sumi currently presented would have been bad. Both of them together was somehow offensive, too contradictory to be possible, too concrete to be denied.

“How far is the walk to your farm?” asked Kade.

Rini thought a moment before saying, “No more than a day. ‘A good day’s journey is like baking soda: use it well, and the cake will rise up to meet you.’”

Christopher blinked. “You mean the world rearranges itself so that everyplace you want to go is within a day’s walk from where you are?”

“Well, sure,” said Rini. “Isn’t that how it works where you’re from?”

“Sadly, no.”

“Huh,” said Rini. “And you call my world nonsensical.”

Christopher didn’t have an answer to that.

Cora’s calves were aching by the time they reached the end of the beach, and it was sweet relief to step up onto the solid bedrock of baked goods, feeling them firm beneath her feet. The graham cracker and shortbread had more give to it than rock would have, like walking on the rubber-infused concrete at Disneyland. She still desperately wanted to sit down, but if all the roads here were like this one, she would be okay for a while.

They hadn’t walked very far when the first of the vegetation began to appear—if you could call it that. The trees had gingerbread and fudge trunks, and spun-sugar leaves surrounding clusters of gummy fruit and jelly beans. The grass looked like it had been piped from a frosting bag. Rini paused to lean up onto her toes and grab a handful of cake pops off the lower branches of a tree, beginning to munch as she resumed walking.

“It’s never a good idea to eat the ground,” she said blithely, cake between her teeth and frosting on her lips. “People walk on it.”

“But if the dirt here is edible, what does it matter if somebody’s feet are dirty?” asked Christopher.

Rini swallowed before giving him a withering look and saying, “We still pee. People pee, and then other people step in it, and they walk on the ground. I don’t want to eat something that has somebody’s pee on it. That’s gross. Do they eat pee where you come from?”

“It’s not a given!” protested Christopher. “None of the skeletons in Mariposa do … that. They eat sometimes, and they still enjoy the taste of wine and ginger beer, but they don’t have stomachs, so everything goes straight through them.”

Cora blinked at him. “But you—”

“Don’t ask.” Christopher shook his head. “It was messy and unpleasant and we worked it out eventually, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Rini,” said Kade, before she could ask Christopher to explain further, “how is it that everything here’s made out of candy except for the people?”

“Oh, that’s easy.” Rini bit into another cake pop, swallowing before she said, “Confection is like a jawbreaker. Layers and layers and layers, all stacked on top of each other, going all the way down to the very middle, which is just this hard little ball of rock and sadness. Sort of like your world, only smaller.”