Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

“Thanks,” said Kade flatly.

Rini didn’t seem to notice. “It’s a world, so even though nobody lived there, somebody eventually had a door that led there. She looked around, and she thought, ‘Well, this is awful,’ and then she thought, ‘It would be better if I had some bread,’ and then she found a stove and all the stuff she needed for bread, because Confection was already wanting to be born. So she baked and baked and baked. She baked all the bread she could eat, and then she baked herself a bed, and then she baked herself a house to put her bed in, and then she thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if I had something softer to walk on,’ and she baked enough bread to go all the way around the world twice, so that the stone was gone, and she had a whole kingdom out of bread. It was still pretty small, though, and eventually she got bored and baked herself a doorway home, and she never came back.” She paused. “But her daughter did. And her daughter didn’t much care for bread, on account of how she’d been a baker’s daughter all her life, but wow, did she like cookies.…”

Rini’s story went on and on, spinning out the creation of Confection in great, lazy loops as the bakers—what seemed like an endless succession of bakers, one after the other—came through the door the Breadmaker had baked. Each of them stayed long enough to add another layer to the world, becoming the next name in the long pantheon of Confection’s culinary gods.

“… and after the Brownie-maker put down her layer of the world, plants started growing. I guess that’s just what happens when you have that much sugar in one place.”

“No,” said Cora. “No, it’s usually really not.” She wanted to say more, like how bread got stale and moldy, and ice cream wasn’t usually stable enough to serve as the basis for a glacier, no matter how cold it got, but she bit her tongue. The rules were different here, as they had been different in the Trenches, and in the Halls of the Dead, and in all the worlds on the other side of a disappearing, impossible door.

Rini would probably be horrified to hear about bread mold and freezer burn and all the other things that could happen to the base materials of her world on the other side of the door. And maybe that explained the conception of Confection. Maybe the first baker, the girl who just wanted to make bread, had come from a place where there was never enough food, or where the bread went bad before she could eat it. So she’d baked and baked and baked, until her stomach wasn’t empty anymore, until she wasn’t afraid of starving, and then she’d gone home, having learned the only lesson that a small and empty world had to teach her.

According to Rini, Confection was like a jawbreaker. Cora thought it was more like a pearl, layers on layers on layers, all surrounding that first, all-encompassing need. Hunger was about as primal as needs got. What if all worlds were like that? What if they were all built up by the travelers who tripped over a doorway and found their way to someplace perfect, someplace hyperreal, someplace they could need? Someplace where that need could be met?

The beach was too far behind them now for the sound of the waves to reach, although the air still smelled faintly of strawberry. Cora supposed that could be a consequence of the soda soaked into their clothes, which was drying sweet and sticky on the skin. A fly buzzed over to investigate, its body made of a fat black jellybean, its legs strands of thinly twisted licorice. She swatted it away.

Rini, her cheeks still bulging with cake pop, stopped walking. “Uh-oh,” she said, voice rendered thick and gooey by the contents of her mouth. She swallowed hard. “We have a problem.”

“What is it?” asked Kade.

Rini pointed.

There, ahead, coming over a hill made of treacle tart and whipped meringue, rode what seemed like the beginnings of an army. It was impossible to tell at this distance whether their horses were real or some extremely clever bit of baking, but that didn’t really matter, because a sword made of sugar can still be sharp enough to cleave all the way to the bone. The knights who rode those implacable steeds wore foiled armor that glittered in the sun, and there was no question of their intentions.

“Run, maybe?” said Rini, and turned, and fled, with the others close behind her.

*

OF COURSE THEY TRIED to run: to do anything else would have been foolish.