Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

“And the rules here aren’t like the rules you had back in Mariposa,” said Cora slowly.

Christopher nodded. “Exactly. Mariposa was Rhyme and Logic, and this place is Nonsense and Reason. I can’t say whether it’s Wicked or Virtuous, but that doesn’t really matter for me, because Mariposa is Neutral, so it can sync to either. What it can’t handle is Nonsense.”

“My head hurts,” said Cora.

“Welcome to the club,” said Kade.

They had reached the end of the candy corn field. The trio stepped out of the green, onto the hard-packed crumble of the dirt in front of the farmhouse. It was impossible to tell what it was made of without tasting it, and Cora found that her curiosity didn’t extend to licking the ground. That was good. It was useful to know that there were limits to how far she was willing to commit to this new reality. Or maybe she just didn’t want to eat dirt.

There was Rini, in front of the farmhouse, with her arms around a man who was taller than she was by several inches. He must have towered over Sumi even when she was a fully grown adult woman, and not the teenage skeleton standing silently off to one side. His hair was yellow. Not blond: yellow, the color of ripe candy corn, the color of butterscotch.

“The people here are made of meat, right?” murmured Cora.

Kade glanced down at the patch of blood on his trousers and said, “Pretty damn sure.”

“How do they not all die of malnutrition? How do they still have any teeth?”

“How did your skin not rot and fall off when you spent like, two years living in saltwater all the time?” Kade flashed her a quick, almost wry smile. “Every world gets to make its own rules. Sometimes those rules are going to be impossible. That doesn’t make them any less enforceable.”

Cora was silent for a moment. Finally, she said, “I want to go home.”

“Don’t we all?” asked Christopher mournfully, and that was that: there was nothing else to say. They walked toward Rini and her family, hoping for a miracle, hoping for a solution, while the fields of candy corn grew green all around them, reaching ever for the sun.

*

RINI WAITED UNTIL her friends—were they her friends now? Had they bonded sufficiently in adversity that they could use that label? She’d never really had friends before, she didn’t know the rules—were almost upon her before letting go of her father and stepping back, letting him see them, letting them see him.

He was tall. They’d been able to see that from a distance, along with the unnatural yellow of his hair. What they hadn’t been able to see was that his eyes were like Rini’s, candy corn somehow transformed into an eye color, or that his hands were large and calloused from a lifetime spent working in the fields, or that his face had been tanned by the sun until he was almost as dark as his daughter, although his undertones were different, warm where hers were cool, ruddy red and peach, not amber and honey. They looked nothing alike. They looked absolutely alike.

Kade, who had known Sumi better than either of his companions, looked at Rini, and looked at her father, and saw Sumi in the differences between them, the places where she had been added to the recipe that, when properly baked, had resulted in her daughter.

“Sir,” he said, with a very small bow. It seemed appropriate, somehow. “I’m Kade. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Thank you for bringing my daughter home,” said Rini’s father. “She tells me you’ve had quite the adventure. The Queen of Cakes is back to her old tricks, is she? Well, I suppose that was the only thing that could happen in a world where my Sumi never made it back to me.” He sounded less sad than simply resigned. This was the way he had always expected the world to go: snatching joy out of his hands for the sheer sake of doing it, and not because he, personally, had done anything to earn the loss. “My name is Ponder, and it’s a pleasure to have you on my farm.”

“This is no time for manners and moodiness, Daddy,” said Rini, with a little of her old imperiousness. Being near her father seemed to be bolstering her spirits, enough to remind her that, fading or not, she was still here; there was still time for her to fix this. “I found Mom. I found her bones in a world that didn’t know how to laugh, and I found her spirit in a world that didn’t know how to run, and now I need you to tell me how to find her heart, so I can stick them all back together again.”

Rini smiled at her father when she finished, guilelessly bright, like he was the answer to all her prayers: like he was going to make things right again.