Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

A step, and Cora saw that the walls weren’t painted. They were piped frosting, puffed and placed to create the illusion of depth. Another step, and she saw that the bushes and trees were in jawbreaker pots, their roots trimmed to keep them from growing out of control.

On the third step, a veil of transplanted sugar vegetation was drawn back, and there was the Queen of Cakes, a thin, pinch-faced woman in a gown that was also a six-tiered wedding cake, its surface crafted from frosting and edible jewels. It didn’t look like it could possibly be comfortable. Cora wasn’t even sure the woman could move without cracking her couture and forcing it to be re-baked. She was holding a scepter in one hand, a long, elaborate stick of blown sugar and filigreed fondant, matching the crown upon her head.

The Queen looked at each of them in turn, eyes lingering for a moment on Sumi before finally settling on Rini. She smiled, slow and sweet.

“At last,” she said. “Your mother did not invite me to your first birthday party, you know, and I the ruler of these lands. The first slice of cake should have been mine, to take as proper tribute.”

“My mother offered the first slice of cake to the First Baker, as is right and proper, and she didn’t invite any dead people to my party,” said Rini smartly. “Not that we’d have invited you if you hadn’t been dead. She always said you were the sort of person who never met a party she couldn’t spoil.”

The Queen of Cakes scowled for a moment—but only for a moment, her face smoothing back into pleasant placidity so fast that it felt like the scowl might well have been a lie. “Your mother was wrong about so many things. I can still remember her pouring hot grease on my hands. My beautiful hands.” She held them up, showing that they were perfect and intact. “She thought to stop me, but look at me now. I’m here, healthy and hale and resuming my rule, and you, her precious little potential, you’re fading away to nothing. How long do you think you have before the world realizes that you never existed and swallows you completely? I’ll want to know when to plan my own party. The one to celebrate living forever.”

“You were one of us,” said Cora wonderingly.

The Queen of Cakes turned, eyes narrowed, to face her. “I don’t recall inviting you to speak, dear,” she said. “Now shut that fat mouth of yours, or I’ll fill it for you.”

“You were one of us,” Cora repeated, not flinching from the venom in the word “fat.” If anything, it was too familiar to really hurt. She’d heard that sort of hatred before, always from the women in her Weight Watchers groups, or at Overeaters Anonymous, the ones who had starved themselves into thinness and somehow failed to find the promised land of happy acceptance that they had always been told waited for them on the other side of the scale.

“One of who?” asked the Queen, venom in every word, a poisoned slice of fudge waiting to be shoved past Cora’s lips.

“You found a door. You’re not from here any more than Sumi was.” Cora glanced to Kade, looking for confirmation, and felt hot validation fill her chest when he nodded, ever so slightly telling her that his suspicions were the same. She looked back to the Queen. “Were you a baker? Sumi wasn’t a baker. She was…”

“A violinist,” said Kade. “She didn’t want to bake cakes. She just wanted to do something useful with her hands. She needed Nonsense, and I guess Nonsense needed her, with you trying to make it follow rules it never wanted.”

The Queen of Cakes pursed her lips. “You must be from Sumi’s world,” she said primly. “You’re just as obnoxious as she was. She’s quiet now. How did you make her that way?”

“Well, she died, so that was a large part of it,” said Kade.

“Dead people normally stay in their graves, out of the way of the rest of us. This, though…” The Queen smiled. “What a gift you’ve given me. No one will ever stand against me again when they see that my great enemy has been reduced to a shadow over a skeleton. How did you achieve it? I’ll let you all go home, if you’ll only tell me.”

It would be a lie to say that the offer wasn’t, in some ways, tempting. They had each been called upon to save a world and save themselves in the process, but not this world. Not even Rini had been called upon to save this world. She was trying to save her mother, which was something very different, even if it was still very admirable. They could go back to the school and wait for their doors to open, wait for the chance to go back to the worlds where things made sense, leaving this place and its nonsense behind. This wasn’t their fight.