Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

The kitchen had no walls, and no pantry. When she needed something, she would step outside its bounds and reach down into the junkyard surrounding, coming up over and over again with the right ingredients in her hands. Eggs, milk, flour, butter, vanilla beans and ginger roots, they were all there, waiting for her to scavenge them out of the dust. She didn’t seem to understand that this was strange, that when the rest of them looked at the junkyard, they saw only failures, not the building blocks of new successes. This wasn’t their place. There was no question that it was hers.

Bit by bit, she had built up Sumi’s limbs with rice cereal mixed with melted marshmallow and honey, covering each layer with a thin sheet of modeling chocolate, until the combined confection began to look like human musculature. She was working on Sumi’s shoulders when the timer dinged on one of her ovens. She crossed to it, opened it, and withdrew a sheet of sugar cookie organs, each dusted with a different color of sugar.

“It helps that bones don’t melt,” she said, using a spatula to slide the organs off the cookie sheet and onto a cooling rack. “I don’t need to worry about putting something hot on top of them and losing the whole structure. That happens with the volcanos around here sometimes. It’s really tedious.”

“Um,” said Christopher. “All of this is cool to watch, if a little nightmare fuel-esque, but people are usually made of meat, not Rice Krispy treats. We need a functional Sumi. You’re making a cake that looks sort of like her.”

“Baking something transforms it, and anyone who’s ever eaten a piece of cake will tell you that sometimes we can take baked goods and turn them into a part of ourselves,” said the Baker serenely. She was in her element: she knew exactly what she was doing, and was content to continue doing it until the job was done. “If this works, she’ll be made of the same stuff as you and I.”

Cora, who had heard plenty of jokes about cake and brownies going straight to her thighs, looked down at her short-clipped fingernails, picking at them to dislodge the last bits of sticky pinkness left over from the Strawberry Sea, and said nothing at all.

“Huh,” said Christopher.

The Baker laughed. It was a bright, utterly joyful sound. “I love baking,” she said. “It lets you make the world you want, and it makes everything delicious.” She picked up a large pastry bag, beginning to pipe frosting intestines into the hollow of Sumi’s gut.

Bit by bit, the glittering bone disappeared under layers of pastry. Bit by bit, the structure of the Baker’s creation was built up to overlap the silent, almost disapproving shade, until the Baker was using modeling chocolate to sculpt the fine angles and planes of Sumi’s face. Layers of yellow cake had been laid down for the fatty tissue, covered by a slightly thicker layer of gingerbread which was covered in turn by a fondant shell, dyed a few shades darker than Rini’s skin.

“Hair, hair, hair,” hummed the Baker, and leaned out of the kitchen, snatching a fistful of what looked like black candy floss out of the mess. She held it up and beamed. “You never know when you’re going to need black cotton candy. Shouldn’t eat the stuff, though. It’ll dye your tongue black for a week.” She stuck out her own tongue, which was currently a cheery shade of blue, before beginning to apply the filmy black material to the top of Sumi’s head. When it was on, she picked up a roll of parchment paper and draped it delicately over the body. “She’s almost ready to go into the oven. Let’s hope this works.”




“What happens if it doesn’t?” asked Rini.

The Baker sighed. “We try something else, I suppose.”

“Her skeleton will be fine,” said Christopher. “I don’t know whether you can bake the ghost of somebody’s boring side, but the skeleton won’t care unless that oven is way too hot.”

“I’m not into cremating my cookies,” said the Baker.

“There you go,” said Christopher. “No worries.”

The Baker laughed. “All right, I like you people. Someone come and help me lift her into the oven.”

The cake, cereal, and chocolate had added so much weight to the skeleton that it took Cora and Kade working in concert to help the Baker shift the baking sheet into the oven. The heat that flowed out when she opened the door was intense enough to make them shy back, the small hairs on their arms crisping as they drew closer.

“In she goes,” said the Baker, and slid the tray—and Sumi—smoothly inside. The door swung closed behind her.

“Now what?” asked Cora.

“Now we wait,” said the Baker. “We wait, and we hope.”





12

THE BAKER’S STORY

THEY SAT ON A broken gingerbread wall, feet dangling, sipping glasses of cool, surprisingly unmodified milk. It was sweet in the way milk was always sweet, but it wasn’t malted, or chocolatey, or anything else that would have made it fit better into the world. Cora gave the Baker a curious look.

“Where did you get the milk?” she asked.

“It grows on trees,” said the Baker serenely.

Cora stared.

“No, really,” said the Baker. “In these big white fruits that look sort of like eggs. One of the previous bakers came up with that. I just enjoy it.” She took another sip of her milk. “Ah. Refreshing and bizarre.”

“Are you religious?” asked Christopher.

The Baker turned to blink at him. “Excuse me?”