Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

Kade nodded grimly. “It was part of saving Mariposa, for him. He told me when I was updating the record of the world.”

In addition to his duties as the school tailor, Kade was an amateur historian and mapmaker rolled into one, recording the stories of all the children who came through the school. He said it was because he was trying to accurately map the Compass that defined Nonsense and Logic, Virtue and Wickedness, all of the other cardinal directions of the worlds on the other side of their doors. Cora thought that was probably true, but she also thought he liked the excuse to talk to people about their shared differences, which became their shared similarities when held up to the right light. They had all survived something. The fact that they had survived different somethings didn’t change the fact that they would always be, in certain ways, the same.

“Can it be put back?”

Christopher shook his head, and muttered weakly, “Wouldn’t want it. There was something wrong inside. A dark thing. The doctors said it was a tumor. But the Skeleton Girl piped it away and freed me. Owe her … everything.”

“But…”

“It’s still mine.” There was a flicker of fierceness in Christopher’s voice, there and gone in an instant, like it had never existed in the first place.

Kade sighed, patting Christopher on the shoulder before he rose and walked over to stand next to Cora at the window. Dropping his voice to a low murmur, he said, “This doesn’t happen as much as it used to—I guess the universe figured out it was an asshole move—but it’s happened before. Kids who went through doors and came back with some magical item or other that still worked in our world, where there isn’t supposed to be much magic at all.”

“So?”

“So you want magic in our world, you pretty much have to be paying for it out of your own self, somehow. Most of the time, the magic item’d been tied to the person with blood or with tears or with something else that came out of their bodies. Or, in this case, a whole damn bone. The magic that powers the flute is Christopher. If he doesn’t get it back…”

Cora turned to gape at him, horrified. “Are you saying he’ll die?”

“Maybe not die. He’s never been separated from it for more than a few minutes. Maybe he’ll just get really sick. Or maybe the cancer will come back. I don’t know.” Kade looked frustrated. “I interview all the newbies, I write everything down, because there are so many doors, and so many little variations on the theme, and we don’t know. He might die if we don’t get it back. He wouldn’t be the first.”

Their stories were written down too, by Eleanor before his time, or by the other rare scholars of travel and consequence, of the space behind the doors. They wrote about girls who wasted to nothing when they were separated from their magic shoes or golden balls, about boys who burned alive in the night when their parents took away their cooling silver bells, about children who had been found at the bottom of the garden, magically cured of some unthinkable disease, only for the sickness to come rushing back ten years later when a sibling or one of their own children broke a little crystal statue that they had been instructed not to touch.

Travel changed people. Not all of the changes were visible, or even logical by the rules of a world where up was always up and down was always down and skeletons stayed in the ground instead of getting up and dancing around, but that didn’t make the changes go away. They existed whether they were wanted or not.

Cora, whose hair grew in naturally blue and green, all over her body, looked uneasily over her shoulder at Christopher, who was huddled in a pile of gummi bears, shivering.

“We have to get his flute back,” she said.

“How do you suggest we do that?” asked Rini. Her voice was flat, dull, devoid of sparkle or whimsy. She had given up. The resignation was visible in every remaining inch of her, slumped and shattered as she was. “The Queen of Cakes has an army. We have … nothing. We have nothing, and she has us, and she has my mother, and it’s over. We’ve lost. I’m going to be unborn, and then I won’t have to worry about this anymore. I hope you can get away. If you can, go to the candy corn fields. The farmers there will help you hide from the Queen. She hates them and they hate her, but candy corn isn’t like most crops. It won’t burn. So she leaves them alone as much as she can, and you’ll be okay.”

Rini paused for so long that Cora thought she was done talking. Then, in a hushed tone, she said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought you here. This is all my fault.”